Alerting Services
Benefits
Current Awareness. These services can help you keep up with articles in your area of interest and the contents of journals that you specify. The scope of coverage will vary with each resource but alerting services are available in all disciplines and for thousands of journals.
Customized Content. Alerting services allow users to exercise control over the substance of the information that is delivered, the amount of information that is provided and the regularity with which that information arrives.
Time Management. Information is delivered automatically by the service and searches can be conducted without constant user input or supervision.
Organization. These services can aid in the construction of personal databases in bibliographic management software such as EndNote, ProCite and RefWorks. The services described in this guide can be accessed in three manners:
Types
Alerting Services will vary. However, they most commonly entail one of the following:
- Search Alerts and Saved Searches automatically run your saved queries on a regular basis. You receive the results in an e-mail. Types of search alerts include topic searches, author searches, and citation searches.
- Table of Contents (TOC) Alerts automatically send the tables of contents of newly published journal issues to your inbox for your review.
A Word About RSS
RSS (Rich Site Summary, Really Simple Syndication or RDF Site Summary) is available from a growing number of electronic resources, including publishers of scholarly material. RSS is a method of content distribution. RSS is available for publications in Ingenta and through the University of Chicago Press and Cambridge Journals Online. Links are provided for all three in this guide. To learn more about RSS, please see the following URLs:
Publisher Alerting Services
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(In the majority of cases, the following links will take users to the websites of publishers or scholarly societies. Alerting services for their journals are available upon registration and/or the provision of an e-mail address so you may be asked to create a person login. Some publishers produce journals in particular disciplines while others produce journals across many disparate fields of study.)
- American Chemical Society
- American Institute of Physics Virtual Journals
- American Geophysical Union
- American Mathematical Society
- American Medical Association
- American Society for Microbiology
- Annual Reviews
- Berkeley Press
- Blackwell Synergy
- Cambridge Journals Online
- Commonwealth Scientific & Industrial Publishing
- Elsevier (Science Direct)
- Emerald
- Extenza
- Haworth Press
- Highwire Press
- IEEE
- Institute of Physics
- Institute of Pure and Applied Physics
- ISI Web of Knowledge
- Karger
- Kluwer
- Lawrence Erlbaum Associates
- MetaPress
- MIT Press
- Nature Journals
- Oxford University Press
- Palgrave McMillan
- Public Library of Science
- Rand Institute
- Royal Society
- Royal Society of Chemistry
- Sage Journals
- Springer
- Taylor and Francis
- University of California Press
- University of Chicago Press (RSS)
- Wiley
- World Scientific
Database Alerting Services
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(The following links will take users to indexes or databases that provide alerting services for the journals covered.)
- ADS MyADS offers three e-mail notifications which contain information on new preprints, astronomy journal papers, and physics journal papers. Preprint notices will be distributed weekly, while astronomy and physics notices will be distributed each time those databases are updated which is approximately every two weeks. The same information alsois available via custom web sites for each myADS user.
- Anthrosource After registering, users may customize e-mail alerts to keep abreast of the new content in journals published by the American Anthropological Association.
- BioOne Online issue alerts notify users by e-mail about the appearance of new issues of any of BioOne's seventy high-impact research journals in the biological, ecological and environmental sciences.
- CSA Click "Alerts" in the top-right section of the database page to create a personal login and to configure your alerts.
- EBSCO Choose "MasterFile Select - Full Text Magazines." From the "Choose Database" page, select the title list from your preferred database. Individual journal titles will have a "Journal Alert" link on the individual publication pages.
- Historical Abstracts & America: History and Life Upon accessing either database, users may create a unique "CLIO Alert Profile" for monthly updates of new content.
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Ingenta (RSS)
After registering with Ingenta, users may browse publications and set up alerts, by clicking the "Browse Publications" link at the top the database page. The database offers Saved Searches, Search Alerts and TOC Alerts for thousands of journals in multiple fields. - ISI Web of Knowledge Set up a free e-mail Search or TOC Alert from the Science Citation Index Expanded, the Social Sciences Citation Index, and Arts & Humanities Citation Index
- OVID Set up a free account from within an OVID database by clicking on the "Personal Account" link in the top right. Conduct a search and then select "SaveSearch/Alert" in the search history window to set up your "autoalert."
- Project Muse Receive weekly e-mail notifications of new journal issues or new titles available.
- ProQuest Enter the database and perform a search for your desired query or publication. Then click the "Set up Alerts" button. You can find this button in: Basic and Advanced Search Results, Recent Searches, Publication Search or My Research Summary.
- PubMed [Medline] Alerting Services My NCBI saves searches and features an option to automatically update and e-mail search results from your saved searches.
- Science Direct (Elsevier) The free alerting service allows you to save searches, create search alerts, journal issue alerts and citation alerts, and create a personal journal list which you can browse and search. ScienceDirect indexes over 1200 peer reviewed journals.
- SilverPlatter Set up a free account from within a SilverPlatter database by clicking on the "SDI" link in the top right. Conduct a search, select the SDI box, and then select "Create SDI." Alternately, any search that you conduct can be added as an alert/SDI search from the "search history" screen under the "create SDI" button.
Journal Alerting Services
An alerting service may often be provided by a journal's publisher. Examples from three disciplines are provided below. To find a publisher's webpage, use Ulrich's Periodical Directory. In many cases, a link to the journal page, hosted by the publisher, will be provided in this periodical directory. Alerts, when available, can be accessed from such webpages. Keep in mind that not all publishers and/or journals offer these services. If there is no alerting service on the web page of the journal's publisher, try Ingenta.
