Keep Up to Date

There are many ways to keep up to date with research in your field, including setting alerts and via social media.

An alert is a regular automatic email notification.  It is an easy and effective way to keep up to date.

You can set up alerts to get notified about:

• new articles published on a saved search topic
• new work by an author
• new citations of an article or author
• new table of contents of key journals

For example

• Register with a database, login and save a search.  You can ask the database to re-run this search for you at a specified frequency.
• The results are emailed to you as an alert. The email includes citations and links to the full text of the article.

See the Database alerts and Journal table of contents pages on this guide.

RSS = Really Simple Syndication. Look for the RSS feed icon on websites

RSS is used to keep up to date with frequently updated content on news websites and blogs, but can also be found on databases.  Its use has declined with the rise in social media and email alerts.

To receive RSS feeds you usually subscribe to a feed from a blog or similar, and have it delivered to a Feed Reader. Some websites and databases point to RSS feeders automatically - meaning a one-click process to add them to your feed.

RSS feed readers:

• Feedly is one popular RSS reader. It is included on this review of free RSS readers.
• Outlook and Firefox also include Feed Reading functionality
• Personalized home pages, such as Netvibes are another option for free RSS feeds
• RSS feed reader apps are available for mobile, see this review of RSS reader apps