Keeping up to date (1/2)
New issues of journals
There are several alerting services that notify you when a new issue of a journal is published.
Zetoc is a service based on the British Library's Electronic Table of Contents of around 20,000 current journals and around 16,000 conference proceedings. You can set up one (or more) lists of journals that are of interest to you, and you will then be sent the table of contents via email when a new issue has been published.
The video below introduces Zetoc and how to use it effectively.
Transcript of the Video (Word File)
You can also use Zetoc to set up alerts for particular keywords, but be aware that it will only search for these in the title of an article so it won't be a very exhaustive search.
TicTocs (http://www.tictocs.ac.uk/) is a similar service that provides alerts from 13,000 titles.
Articles in your research area
Many of the databases available through the Electronic Library allow you to register with them and save your searches and lists of useful articles. It is also possible to make these into alerts which can be automatically run on a daily, weekly or monthly basis and which will email you any new articles which meet your search criteria. This can help you to keep up to date without having to manually search databases each time.
The larger databases such as Scopus and Web of Knowledge are good places to start experimenting with search alerts. It's important to consider the search terms you are using for your alerts – if they are too broad you will receive alerts with too many irrelevant articles but if they are too specific you may miss out on potentially useful articles.
Scopus has a useful tutorial on how to set up alerts titled 'Using the Personalized Features'.
