Researcher Skills Toolkit
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Research is constantly updated with new knowledge. If you are working on a thesis, literature review or other project over an extended period, it is important to stay up to date with new literature. Alerts can be set up via journal databases, publisher websites, social media and Internet search engines, such as Google. Click the tabs below for more information on how to keep up to date.. |
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Search alerts help you to:
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Some journals include guidelines on how often searches for their published reviews should be updated. For example the Cochrane Handbook for Systematic Reviews of Interventions states:
The published review should be as up to date as possible. Searches for all the relevant databases should be rerun prior to publication if the initial search date is more than 12 months (preferably six months) from the intended publication date. (Cochrane Handbook, 4.4.10)
Most journal databases include features that allow you to set up alerts. To use them, you will need to create an account for the database. The frequency of delivery can be adjusted to suit your needs, and alerts can be suspended or cancelled as required.
Saving your search will allow you to run the same search again later. It will also serve as a record of the searches that you have previously run in the database. Search alerts will notify you when a new item that satisfies your search is added to the database. You will need to set up saved searches and search alerts separately for each database that you use.
Table of contents alerts provide notification when records for new issues of journals have been published and added to a database.
Citation alerts can be set up to generate alerts whenever a nominated article or author is cited by another author:
They are useful for:
NOTE: Journal databases identify only citations indexed within that database. Therefore, the number of citations can differ between databases.
Table of contents alerts provide notification each time a new issue of a journal is published. Databases often take some time to add new records, so it is usually timelier to set up table of content alerts directly at the journal website.
Some publishers (including Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, Elsevier, and Springer) provide the ability to track citations for articles they publish.
Google provides the ability to set up:
Many book publishers provide the option to send alerts when new publications in an area of interest are published. Check individual publisher websites for more details.
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