As a followup to the previous post, thought I'd make sure that I mentioned Google Scholar, Google's academic search engine (see: http://scholar.google.com/). Google Scholar is nice, but I'd like to see it include more power search options, such as what you find in Scirus or Scopus (a fee-based product). Features like citation analysis, searching by subject, by region, as well as other features would be welcome additions.

What tools / techniques do researchers use when conducting "environmental scanning" projects? While the general reading and scanning of resources on the web and print help; I've also found services like Scopus can be of great value when looking for trends in scholarly literature ... some concepts and new ideas will be published in these journals before they're ever seen in everyday life. I've made extensive use of Scopus's ability to do link analysis. One of my favorite techniques is to find articles we liked from 5 - 10 years back, look up the articles on Scopus, then check the citation records to see who cited the original article and what the original authors have published since. In some cases, I'll find completely new concepts to research that cite the orignial articles. 

Of course one can also subscribe to specialized mailing lists to listen in to subject specialists ... occassionally you'll find news/developments months before they break in the traditional media.