Thing 4: Journal, search and citation alert subscriptions

For this Thing, you can just subscribe to one journal’s table of contents, or you can choose another kind of alert, or indeed many alerts to subscribe to. Don't forget to write about the process on your blog, so that our tutors can offer you support and tips.

One journal’s table of contents
This can be a pretty quick thing to do… You can subscribe to journal table of content alerts in a number of different ways. The simplest way might be to visit the home page of your favourite journal, and look for options to get e-mail or RSS notifications from there. For example, read about Wiley-Blackwell journal alerts here: http://www.wiley.com/bw/ealerts/

Many journals’ tables of contents
If you want to manage journals' table of contents alerts in your e-mail inbox then ZETOC is likely to be the best place for you to set up alerts: http://zetoc.mimas.ac.uk/ In this way, you can watch numerous journals and searches, and then manage the e-mails as they arrive in your inbox since all alerts will come from the same source and you will only need to set up one filtering rule to manage them all. ZETOC do also offer RSS feeds: http://zetoc.mimas.ac.uk/rssjnllist.html

Search alerts
Other than subscribing to tables of contents for journals, you might want to subscribe to a particular search on your favourite journals database, so that you get notifications of when new articles are added to the database which match your search criteria. It is probably best that you investigate your own database(s) of choice for your discipline, but as an example, Web of Knowledge’s instructions are available at: http://images.webofknowledge.com/WOK45/help/WOK/h_save_history.html

To visit Web of Knowledge, start at the Library’s databases listing at W: http://webcat.warwick.ac.uk/search/y?w
Note that you will need to “sign in” twice on most databases: once to authenticate yourself as a member of the University of Warwick and once to identify yourself to your own account on the database. One process might be called a login and the other a sign in.

Citation alerts
Web of Science within Web of Knowledge is a citations database. (You can read about the collections and their disciplinary coverage which is much broader than just science at: http://images.webofknowledge.com/WOK45/help/WOK/h_database.html) So when you are viewing an article on Web of Science, you can click on a small button “Create Citation alert” to get notifications of when new articles are added to the database which cite the one you are interested in.
Read more about these at: http://images.webofknowledge.com/WOK45/help/WOK/h_citalerts.html#cited_articles_add

Jenny Delasalle : 26 Oct 2011 10:47 |  Tags: Citation Alerts Journal Alerts RSS Search Alerts Theme2 Thing4 |  Comments (3) |  Report a problem