7: Creating journal alerts
In this chapter
Alerts: the different types
As a researcher, it can be tough keeping up to date with the new developments in your discipline: research papers are being published every day all over the world, in both old and new media. Journal alerts can be a useful tool to ensure that content is delivered straight to you, rather than having to search for it.
Journal alerts are notifications of new journal issues, new articles or tables of contents (TOCs), delivered via e-mail, RSS feed or aggregator at regular intervals. Similarly, search alerts like Google Alerts (http://www.google.com/alerts) can notify you of the latest new search results on a given topic. You can use both journal and search alerts to receive regular updates on the work happening in your field.
Advantages of using alerts
Setting up journal alerts
Databases and online journals allow you to set up journal alerts either by e-mail or Really Simple Syndication (RSS). It is a matter of preference whether you prefer to have e-mail alerts or to receive RSS feeds using a feed reader.
There are minor differences in the way you set up journal alerts for the popular journal databases like EBSCOhost16, Web of Science17 and Proquest18. With each, though, you can choose how frequently and how long the alert should for, and whether to receive brief or detailed records.
Almost all databases should have a guide to setting up alerts. If you are unsure on how to set up an alert, refer to a database’s help pages or technical support. For example, Proquest has detailed pages on how to set up an alert for a publication18 and on managing alerts19.
The University of Wisconsin library20 also has a really useful page that lists databases and instructions for creating alerts.
Table of contents alerts
Another kind of alert will send you the table of contents of any journal you choose. Two good examples this kind of service are Zetoc (http://zetoc.mimas.ac.uk/index.html) and ticTOCs (http://www.tictocs.ac.uk/). One advantage of these is that you only need one account to monitor many journals. Here are some features of Zetoc and ticTOCs:
ticTOCs
Zetoc
Managing journal alerts
If you subscribe to journal alerts via e-mail you can create rules to filter your e-mail into different folders rather than clogging your inbox. It may be an advantage to monitor journals from a single source like Zetoc or ticTOCs so that you create one rule for that single source rather than many rules for each publisher’s alerts.
If staying up-to-the-minute is important to you, you might want to use ticTOCs or set up direct alerts from the journal publishers. ticTOCs are faster because they use the data supplied by publishers while Zetoc and many other sources re-key the data into their databases.
Search alerts
You can subscribe to alerts relevant to given search terms on databases which index journals (including those mentioned earlier: EBSCOhost, Web of Science and Proquest) as well as on Google and Google Scholar.
To subscribe to alerts on Google: sign in to your Google account (or create an account if you don’t have one). Go to Google alerts and then set up your relevant search alert. On Google Scholar (http://scholar.google.co.uk/), you can create an alert by first signing in and then performing a search. You then click the ‘Create email alert’ link to create an alert for your specific search results.
Search alerts are especially useful if it’s important to you to to keep things simple: you can choose just one database or search engine to alert you to all relevant new content. Just make sure first that the database you’re using carries the important journals for your field.
Journal alerts: some disadvantages
Although alerts can make our lives much easier, we can end up subscribing to too many e-mail journal and search alerts, leading to information overload. You will need to manage alerts actively, making the most of software available to organise and delete them, and to unsubscribe from redundant alerts.
You should also be aware that not all journals or databases support alerts. For example, take a look at the list of EBSCOhost databases which support the creation of Journal Alerts 21.
Related researcher articles on the Wolfson Research Exchange site
http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/services/library/researchexchange/topics/gd0018/
http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/services/library/researchexchange/topics/gd0014/
http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/services/library/researchexchange/topics/gd0016/
http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/services/library/researchexchange/topics/gd0008/