Information for Researchers

Alerts notify you by e-mail or RSS feed of new records that are added to a database that match search terms you have specified. You can create as many alerts as you can manage.

There are three types of Alert:

• Search Alerts
• Citation Alerts
• Table of Contents (TOC Alerts)

To create alerts, you must first sign in or register with on the database's website. This is a free service and involves creating a password to access your alert account.

You can also join discussion lists, groups or email lists related to your area of interest. For example Google Groups. 

Stay up to date with journals of interest to you with Table of Contents Alerts (TOC).

You can set up TOC alerts in most databases. If you need help, contact your Liaison Librarian.

• 

  Current Contents Connect (Web of Science)

  Current Contents Connect is a current awareness database that provides easy Web access to complete tables of contents, abstracts, bibliographic information, and abstracts from the most recently published issues of leading scholarly journals, as well as from more than 7,000 relevant, evaluated websites. Also included is full bibliographic information from some electronic journals before they are published. Search for a journal and click Create Alert to set up a table of contents alerting service.

You can set up Search Alerts and Citation Alerts in Google Scholar.

1. Search Alert

• Conduct your search.
• At search results screen, click on Create Alert.
• Put in your email and determine how many results you want.
• Click on Create Alert.

2. Citation Alert

• Conduct your search.
• Identify the article that you want to monitor and be notified when another article cites it.
• Click on Cited by .... link under the article.
• Now you see all the articles citing your article.
• Click on Create Alert.
• Put in your email and determine how many results you want.
• Click on Create Alert.

Email notification is sent when nominated articles are cited by another article. Available from Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar.

• Web of Science 
  • Set up and sign into your personal account to save searches from your search history.
• Scopus 
  •   This link opens in a new window
  • Click on Alerts at the top of the page.
• Google Scholar 
  • Click on Alerts at the top of the page.

Scopus 
This short video will assist in creating an alert for Scopus. 

Web of Science 
This short video will assist in creating an alert for Web of Science.

These sites enable you to track webpages or sites to notify you of any changes that you are monitoring. 

• TrackEngine 
• visualping 

Twitter 

Depending on the topic or subject area, social media such as Twitter can be used to follow people, organizations and groups that are of interest to you. 

You can use a database alerting service to save a search as an alert. The alert automatically searches the database for the latest records matching your saved searches. The database will then send you updated relevant results by e-mail or RSS feed. Usually, you need to create an account in the database to be able to set up alerts. This is free.

Although different databases will have different procedures for setting up search alerts, the general principles are same. You must:

1. Enter the search term or query that you want to receive an alert for

2. Save the search as an alert

3. Name the alert and select alert option (e.g. email alert)

4. Choose alert notification frequency (e.g. receive weekly or monthly alerts)

1. Make sure you are signed In to Library Search
2. Click the Favorites (pin) icon at top right. You will see My Favorites page. 
3. Select Saved Searches. Choose icons for RSS Feeds and/or Alerts to set them up.

Alerts run your query automatically at scheduled timed and send you new results via email.

RSS feeds are also used to notify you of new items found by the query. All you need is to have an RSS reader installed on your computer.

Perform a search and limit your results to New items.