Searching digital libraries

I'm currently looking for research papers on the top scientific digital libraries. For computer science, they are ACM's and IEEE's. Also interesting are Google Scholar and CiteSeer.

My search strategy was to build a table where the rows are the search terms (ex. RFID, Auto-ID, ...) and the columns are the libraries or search engines (ex. ACM, IEEE, Google Scholar, CiteSeer, ...).

I then went through all the table cells, doing the searches and looking at the results.I read the paper's titles and abstracts and selected those more relevant for my current interests. This can be very time consuming. For a 4x4 table, I downloaded a total of 200 papers.

For all downloaded papers, I also stored bibliographic information, preferably in BibTeX format, or at least, the paper's URL location. This will be very handy when I'm writing my own papers.

I'll take note of the date when the search was performed. Then, when I want to update the search, I can then specify that I only want papers published after my last search (this option is usually available as an advanced search parameter).

Another interesting information to retrieve is to identify which conferences are more relevant to my current work, as these can be good publication targets. I put them in my Google conference calendar to keep track of the submission dates.