Sidebar

Main Content

Alerts: Staying Current With Research In Your Field

What are alerts?

Alerts are a way to keep up with what's new in your research area! It can be time consuming to search databases or scan journal table of contents for relevant materials, so consider taking advantage of the many alerting services available through journal vendors and article databases. Typically you register for the service and then create a search strategy or personal profile which will be matched against each update of the database or new journal issue. You are then notified of the new articles either via email or RSS (many services offer you a choice of delivery method).

What types of alerting services are available to me?

• Table of Contents Alerting: Enables you to receive the TOC of your favorite journals as soon as they are published online.
  

• Saved Search/Keyword Alerts: Develop a keyword search and all articles matching your keywords will be sent automatically to you. This can be set up in an article database, i.e. Compendex, or journal database, i.e. ScienceDirect.
  

• Citation alert: Some journal vendors and databases will alert you when a chosen author/article has been cited by another.

• New acquisitions/postings: Find out when new books have been added to the Penn Library Collection using NewBooks+ or new papers added to the ScholarlyCommons@Penn
  

• News/Scholarly Society/Government websites: If you regularly visit a website check to see if they offer an alerting service. Terri Vogel's list of Science & Engineering feeds is a good starting point.

Which journal publishers and databases provide alerts?

Penn Library provides the PennAlerts service which will notify you via email of new tables of contents of journals. Alerts are available for most of the electronic journals in the Penn Library's E-Journals listings, as well as for some other selected journals. To find out more about PennAlerts click here.

To find out about specific journal publishers or databases that provide alerting services visit the Alerting Services in Science, Technology and Medicine page to get details of which journals and databases offer alerting services.

How do I set up alerts?

Instructions for setting up alerts in some key databases such as Web of Science are available from the Saving Database Search Strategies page. Instructions for PennAlerts can be found here.

What is RSS and how can I use it to get my alerts?

RSS is just another way of getting content delivered to you. Rather than receiving information in your email inbox you use an RSS feed reader to display and subscribe to feeds that you are interested in. There are many different feed readers available but a good choice is the Sage RSS Feed Reader which works with the Mozilla FireFox browser. Further information on downloading Sage and subscribing to feeds is available in the Sage RSS Feed Reader Tutorial.

To use RSS for alerts look for or on your favorite journal homepage, in an article database or on news and governmental websites. This signals that alerts are available and that you can subscribe to them using your feed reader. A list of Science and Engineering Journals with RSS feeds is available here.

---

If you need help or have any questions contact:
Douglas McGee, Assistant Director for Engineering & Physical Sciences Libraries at
dmcgee@seas.upenn.edu