Alerting Services
Database Search Alerts
To obtain a comprehensive overview of the literature in your subject area, it is important to carry out systematic, well-structured searches in relevant bibliographic databases.
However, your search results will only be completely up to date on the day you performed the search. So it is very likely that - in order to remain current - you will wish to re-run your searches periodically.
Rather than having to reformulate your search strategies each time, many databases services enable you to save them to be run again later.
Some services, such as CSA (which publishes e.g. British Humanities Index, Index Islamicus) and Thomson Reuters (which publishes e.g. ISI Web of Science) also allow you to set up email or RSS alerts for your saved searches; whenever the database is updated, you will be automatically notified of any new search results produced by your saved searches .
News alerting
Newspapers and other news services are a valuable way of keeping up to date, both in your specific subject area and more generally. Many offer the facility for you to set up email alerts or RSS feeds, which provide links to news items as they are published online. You can often choose to receive alerts either from the whole newspaper or service, or from specific (e.g. subject) sections.
Citation alerts
Citation alerts are available from electronic journals and from bibiographic databases, for example ISI Web of Science, Scopus, and ScienceDirect. You can set them up to notify you by email or RSS feed whenever a journal article that you select is cited by new documents added to the journal or database.
You will usually find guidance on setting up this facility in the help pages for the electronic journal or database, for example:
Or you can watch our demonstration (3 minutes) of How to set up a Citation Alert in Web of Science
