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Setting up alerts

An introductory guide explaining how you can improve your current awareness of academic literature in your research area by setting up email alerts.

Alerts for the tables of contents of your favourite journals

The quickest and most reliable way to get alerts for the most recently published tables of contents is to visit to the Journal homepage on the publisher's website. Most journals provide alerts in either e-mail or RSS format. However, if you want to set up tables of contents alerts for a long list of journals, this service is recommended:

Alerts for literature on a topic or author

The Library's databases provide records of articles and other documents published across thousands of journals. To find useful databases for your subject, please refer to the resource guide for your subject.

In many databases, such as Scopus and Web of Science Core Collection, you can set up the following types of email alert:

  • Topic email alerts enable you to find out the latest research on your topic of interest (based on the search terms that you've used).

  • Author alerts tell you about the latest research written by a specific author(s).

It is advisable to consider setting up individual alerts across a range of databases as no individual database provides information about all documents on a given topic and by all authors.

To find out how to set up either a topic alert or author alert: search the help section within the relevant database or refer to the relevant database guide. If you would like any further information, please contact the Library using the Ask a Librarian enquiry form.

Citation alerts

Databases such as Web of Science enable you to set up an alert to notify you when a particular article has been cited. You might be interested in using this to find out when someone has cited an article or conference paper that you have written.

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