Tools

Information Sheet

Keeping Current

Keep up-to-date in your field(s) of interest through:

 

 

Alerting Services

Alerting services help you to keep up-to-date with what is being published in recent journals. The tables of contents of selected journals are sent to you be email often before the journal issue is published. Some services also allow you to set up profiles based on specific keywords and results will be emailed to you regularly.

Northern Light Free email alerts on topics of your choice.Contents provided from the world's largest Web index.
Ideal Delivers the Table of Contents of any of IDEAL's 174 journals to you via email.
ScienceDirect (Elsevier) Set up a free personal login to this service.Create search alerts, journal issue alerts and citation alertsCreate a favourite journal list, which you can browse and search.
OPAL (Online Psychology Alerting) A free service that provides access to 17 peer reviewed journals in academic psychology.
SARA (Scholarly Articles Research Alerting) Free Access to the Table of Contents of over 740 academic peer-reviewed journals across a variety of subject areas.Receive alerts by keyword, title or category.
Springer-LINK Alert Table of Contents of selected journals from Springer's 253 titles sent to you each month.Full text available to any titles the Library subscribes to in print.
Oxford Journals Delivers the Table of Contents via email for any of the approx. 150 Oxford journals
Cambridge Journals Online Sends results of a specific search on a regular basis from over 100 titles in the areas of science, health and social sciences.
Sage Register for free and receive email notification of the Table of Contents from over 250 journals published by Sage.
ContentsDirect (Elsevier) A free service requiring registration to access table of contents from over 1,100 titles.
CCH Online Register for free and receive daily email notification of news articles in chosen subject areas (Business Management, Accounting, Law, etc)
HighWire Press Table of contents alerts and much full text to many titles in the life sciences, medicine, physical sciences and social sciences.

 

 

Saved Searches

Some databases will let you save your search and re-run it at a later date. This feature is most useful when a database is updated weekly. The following databases allow you to save your searches:

 

 

Pre-Prints and E-Prints

These are publications that have not been accepted by any peer-reviewed publications or self-published works.

  • NetPrints Clinical Medicine & Health Research
  • Cogprints (covers a wide variety of subject areas including psychology, philosophy, linguistics, computer science, and more)

 

 

RSS feeds

RSS is a free, easy way for you to be automatically informed when new content is available from a website or journal. You can use a news reader or aggregator to subsribe to RSS feeds and have all updates and news delivered automatically in one place. Many journals are now providing table of contents updates via RSS feeds. Many traditional news sources also provide RSS feeds.

News readers can either be a web service you can access from any internet enabled computer or locally installed locally on a computer. Recent versions of web browsers such as Firefox and IE7 now have RSS functionality built in.

Once you have set up your news reader you can start subscribing to the content you need, by right-clicking on the RSS icons you find and copying the shortcut/link location into your news reader. Web browsers can detect if feeds are available from a web page and you can add them to your active feeds in a similar way to saving a bookmark or favourite.

This is the icon that is now commonly used to identify feeds. Feed icon

The library offers a number of feeds to keep you informed of new resources and services.

 

News Alerting Services

These services provide email alerts to news and events that are occurring. Some can be set up using specific subjects; others will send you the latest headlines.

For more assistance with accessing newspapers, please see the Newspapers guide.

 

 

Discussion Lists

The following sites provide access to lists of electronic discussion lists in a variety of subjects.