Keeping up to date
It is vital to keep up to date with the latest trends and developments in your research area. This task has been made easier by new communication technologies, and the increasing availability of alerting services from publishers and database providers.
When setting up an alert, choose your preferred method to receive the information - email or RSS feed (Really Simple Syndication).
Set up an alert and receive the latest information directly to your desktop
Journal table of contents alerts
- Table of contents alerts are feeds containing information about the content of each new issue of a journal as soon as it is published.
- The service is available through most databases, as well as from many publishers' websites. Alternatively try ticTOCs to search for and set up an alert to your favourite journals. This website provides a Table of Contents service for more than 12,000 journals.
See an example of setting up a journal table of contents alerts (190 KB)
Database saved search alerts
- Database search alerts allow you to receive details by RSS feed or email of the latest published research.
- Create and save a search in your favourite database. Register first by creating your own individual database login and password. Instructions are available in most databases.
- Remember that your search alert is only as good as your original search – you may need to modify it to get better coverage and/or more relevant results.
Citation alerts
- Citation alerts allow provide updates whenever an article/or author you are interested in has been cited in a new article.
- You can be also notified when someone is citing you by creating an author alert under your name.
- Citation alerts are available through the key citation databases Web of Knowledge and Scopus
See an example of how to set up a citation alert for an author (190 KB) and a citation alert for an article (186 KB) in Scopus.
Research and subject repositories also provide alerting services
- Access Australian research through the National Library database Trove, and search across the contents of Australian university and government research repositories, in addition to several other collections of Australian research. Works include published and unpublished research output.
- Set up an alert in Deakin Research Online and subscribe to the RSS feed for the search result update
- CiteseerX: a digital library of scientific literature
- arXiv.org: an e-prints repository of the sciences from Cornell University Library
Personalised web portals
Consider setting up a personalised web portal to access and manage your alerts. You can choose from a range of template based interfaces and build your own portal to manage RSS journal and news feeds, webpages, tools, searching, and more.
Resources
There are many instructional videos on setting up alerts and RSS feeds easily found on YouTube by searching under RSS feeds.
