Efficient method to receive alerts for new publications
There are a few things Google Scholar can handle, for example here is a query that can be made into an alert and is similar to what you gave as an example:

author:"John Smith" (intitle:"action potential" OR neurophysiology)

To get all the results from a particular author (with or without articles that cite their work) you can search the author, click on his/her name in one of the results and there will be a "Follow" button on the profile page to get email alerts.

If you click the drop-down in the search box you can fill out the advanced search form to make complicated queries and at the bottom of the search results there is a "create an alert" link, but this option seems to disappear if you specify a journal.

As for using regular expressions, hopefully most of your queries can be solved by using OR, e.g. (color OR colour)