Alerts and RSS Feeds

Keeping up with the literature in your Field Keeping up-to-date with the literature on your field can be a difficult task. Alerting services, such as Automated E-mail Alerts and RSS Feeds are a great and easy way to keep current while saving time.
Library databases and publishers offer you these tools to receive:

Latest research on a topic.
Table of contents (TOC) of your favorite journals
New articles corresponding to an author

There are a several ways of tracking what is being published and keeping yourself informed of new and important developments in your field. A selection of current awareness services is outlined below.

Email Alert

Many databases will allow you to set up email alerts to receive new articles from a specific journal, a subject area, by a certain author, or containing specific keywords. See instructions below to find out how to create an email alert.

Blogs and Discussion

Lists Researchers around the world keep each other informed by posting the latest news in Blogs and discussion lists.

Web Pages

There are a variety of services that provide alerting services for what is published on the web.
Some of these services include:

RSS

RSS stands for "Real Simple Syndication," an XML format for sharing syndicated information on the Web. RSS allows people to monitor web sites and databases for new information, without having to visit the site, blog or database.

How do I find RSS Feeds?

Look for the image icons or or on web pages.
Look for RSS options within article databases.
Use a blog directory like Technorati or Google's Blog Search

How do I subscribe to an RSS feed?

To follow an RSS feed, you need a "feed reader".You have several options:

Desktop readers: Thunderbird and RSSReader
Web-based feed readers: Bloglines and Google Reader
Web browsers' readers: Firefox and Safari