Current Awareness
Alerting services, also known as current awareness services or auto alerts, help users keep up to date with the latest developments in their field by notifying them when new information becomes available.
You can also connect with other researchers by setting up a profile on online networking platforms.
Subscribing to alerts
Subscribing to journal alerts, database alerts, and web alerts is a great way to stay up to date.
Journal alerts such as JournalTOCs will send you a table of contents of new issues of any journals you're interested in.
You can also set up search alerts from many databases (including Google Scholar) so that you are alerted by email whenever new articles matching your research interests are published.
Browse databases for your subject.
You might also want to be updated when a change is made to a webpage that you have registered an interest in. Services such as ChangeDetection.com notify you when webpages are changed.
Search-engine alerts like Google Alerts tell you about sites that match your interests which you may not know about.
Connect with other researchers
A number of online platforms are available for researchers and academics. Through these services you can connect with other researchers, share and track the impact of your research, collaborate online, and link your profile to your research outputs online.
LinkedIn is one of the largest online professional networks. Creating a LinkedIn profile will allow you to connect with other researchers across the world.
You might also want to set up a short profile on Piirus, through which you can connect with other researchers with similar interests.
Academia is a platform for academics to share and track the impact of their research. It allows you to see analytics for any papers you have written that are linked to your personal profile. You can find out what search terms people are using to get to your work, and which countries your readers are located in
By creating a profile on ResearchGate, you can connect with other researchers and collaborate online.
As well as providing a free referencing management software, Mendeley allows researchers to share and discuss research
ImpactStory allows you to create your own personal profile and links it to your research outputs online. It will display appropriate impact metrics for each output, which might include tweets, Facebook posts, Figshare downloads, Mendeley readers, PubMed citations or Slideshare views. ImpactStory also allows you to see an overview of the impact of all your research outputs combined.
Other ways to keep up to date
A number of more specific alerts are available.
- JISCMAIL discussion lists: Subject-specific email discussion lists are used for sharing ideas, engaging in discussion, and to announce events and new developments.
- Conference alerts: Automatically receive email notification of new conferences in your subject field. This service lets you specify preferred destination and date.
- Research funding alerts: Research is a searchable database of funding opportunities and research news. It incorporates email alerting service which you can customise.
- Patent alerts: This email alerting service can notify you of new patents in the fields of your choice.