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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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:
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.
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| Netvibes - an example of an RSS reader |
Feedly will also gather your favourite sites in one place.
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| 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:
Similarly
European Research Council and
CORDIS updates can be followed through RSS feeds, twitter and facebook.
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| 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
