Current Awareness Services

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Keeping up to Date with Journal Literature & Conference Proceedings

Journal Alerting Services

It is possible to get tables of content for most journals e-mailed to you every time a new issue is published.

Either sign up via the homepage of the journal in question (check the online journals database for a link).

Alternatively, there is a specific eTOC alerting service that you can subscribe to:

  • ZETOC Alert - database from the British Library indexing contents pages for over 20,000 journal titles and 16,000 conference proceedings.
    • You can set up your own profile of favourite journals, either individually, or for a group. Content pages for selected journals will be e-mailed to you as new issues are published
    • You can also set up a keyword search alert. Details of newly published articles that match your search criteria will be e-mailed to you
Saved searches & automated search alerts for indexing databases

Some indexing databases allow you to save searches, and automatically run them again at stated intervals or a later period, in order to retrieve new journal references that have since been added to the database.

Check out:

General
  • Web of Knowledge - if you sign up for a personal account you can save your search history, and either have new references emailed to you at regular intervals, or set up an RSS feed (this is on;y available for the journal/conference Web of Science part of the Web of Knowledge interface)
    • Conduct your search, and click on the "Search History" tab: the option to save your search history will be there. You can also load and run saved searches from this screen
Social Sciences
  • PsycINFO - set up a personal account and you can save your search history and set up an alert in the EBSCOHost interface. You can also set up an RSS alert
    • Conduct your search, and click on the "Search History/Alerts" tab: the option to save your search history will be there. You can also load and run saved searches from this screen, or set up an RSS feed
Health & Medicine
  • The Cochrane Library - register (free), and you will be able to save searches and run them again at a later date
  • PubMed (Medline) - register to use the My NCBI service: it will allow you to save searches, and set up automatic e-mail search updates. You can also set up an RSS feed for a search by using the drop-down "Send to" menu on the search results screen

Keeping an eye on the news

News Groups & Mailing Lists

Keep up to date by joining a relevant news group or mailing list. See these public mailing list services - they index lists and newsgroups on all subjects:

"Blogs" (web logs) are an alternative source of current information. To identify any relevant sources, see:

News Sites

Organisational and learned society websites often have prominent news features on their sites. Usually, you can sign up for an RSS newsfeed, an e-mail news alert, or the society newsletter.

Newspapers

Major stories and scientific breakthroughs will always be covered in the national and international press. The newspapers and news sources pages will give you information about how to access print and online newspapers.

Keeping an eye on R&D developments

Look at the output of research councils and research funding bodies - see the Research Councils UK website