Keeping up to date - current awareness

An important part of the research process is finding ways to keep up to date with the most recently published information and developments.

There are many alerting and current awareness services available. Most involve registering or setting up a profile but this is usually free.

Journals:

The JournalTOCs - Tables of Contents service allows you to keep up-to-date with newly published scholarly material by enabling you to browse, view, save, and search across thousands of journal tables of contents from hundreds of publishers.

Free registration allows you to create a customised list of your most important and favourite journals, and includes export options such as email alerts, RSS feeds, formats for bibliographic managers. Note: there is a limit of 30 journal titles that can be followed.

Journal TOCs

You could also register for individual journal alerts from your library databases such as American Chemical Society or Science Direct as well as through publisher websites such as Springer.

American Chemical Society

You can set up a search query with google alerts to keep you up to date with new content relating to that topic on the web.  These alerts can be delivered daily by e-mail.

Google Alerts

Mobile apps:

Browzine is a mobile app which brings recent issues of scholarly journals to your mobile device.

Flipboard and Google currents provide a single place to collect and share your favourite sites.

Your Library:

Subscribe to your library updates through facebook, twitter and library blogs such as the Library, Science & Computing or Engineering blogs .  These will keep you up to date about current trials, new journals of interest etc.

Use your library subject supports such as the Science & Computing subject portal.

Patents & Standards:

When you subscribe to Patentalert.com you will receive updates (United States Patent Office) by e-mail.

You can subscribe to RSS feeds from the European Patent Office (copy the RSS URL to an RSS reader such as Netvibes below)

RSS readers:

With Netvibes you can create your own dashboard and customise it with social media, favorite websites and blogs, news, weather, email and more — all in one place.

The netvibes dashboard below has been customised to gather feeds and websites of interest relating to patents and standards.

Netvibes - an example of an RSS reader

Feedly will also gather your favourite sites in one place.

Feedly

Books:

You can follow your favourite publisher on twitter or facebook or register for alert newsletters such as Springer

Google alerts can be refined to just alerting about books.

Newspapers:

You can keep up to date with newspapers such as Irish Times on Twitter and Facebook and Google alerts.

Funding opportunities:

You can subscribe to Science Foundation Ireland or the Irish Research Council through a number of different social media in order to keep up to date with funding calls etc.

Similarly European Research Council and CORDIS updates can be followed through RSS feeds, twitter and facebook.

Subcribe to updates from websites such as SFI

Conferences:

If you subscribe to Conference Alerts you will receive e-mail alerts of upcoming events matching your interests.
MyScienceWork is a social networking site but you can also search for scientific events and news according to your discipline.

Other related blog topics - keep track of your citations 
Other related blog topics - Literature Reviews