Search Alerts
January 11th, 2008 Posted in Research HelpOne way of keeping “up-to-date” in your field of study is to use the search alerting features in our many databases, or on publisher websites. You can usually get tables-of-contents (TOCs) delivered to your email or your RSS reader as soon as a journal issue is published. Unfortunately you will sometimes get these TOCs before we have access to the journal issue, especially if we are still subscribing in paper only, or if the publisher puts a “current issue embargo” on our subscription. In most databases, you can also set up special subject or author alerts, so that whenever anything new is published on a topic or by a specific author, you’ll get an email or RSS notification.
Rather than delineate here all the varied methods each web site uses to offer these alerts, you might want to just start checking out the ones you use most often. If you run into difficulty - and some are certainly not intuitive! - please ask a Reference Librarian for assistance. I have used most of the search alerting systems in our current suite of databases, so I am more than happy to assist you in setting them up.
If you currently use email alerts only, I strongly recommend you try at least one RSS feed. There are a number of ways to do these; you can get separate RSS readers to install on your computer, or you can use features within web browsers to deliver the RSS feeds. At this particular moment, I prefer RSS Reader - it’s a free download, doesn’t bombard me with updates, and just sits there working all the time; I don’t have to do anything. It’s easy to add a new feed, and I get an alerting sound and popup when something comes in. Then when I feel like looking at it, I click on the program icon and glance through. It doesn’t fill up my email box and I don’t have to organize or delete anything. Most publishers and databases are now using RSS as an option.
