Transcript: Keeping Current with Research

Sarah Wright, Reference Librarian, guides the user in how to keep current with research.

Transcript

Hi, my name is Sarah, and I’m one of the reference librarians here at the Health Sciences Library.

I’m going to speak to you briefly about current awareness and scanning the environment and the resources that we have available here through the Health Sciences Library.

Through the Health Sciences Library homepage there are several different ways that you can keep current with research in many different areas.

First we have a guide that we’ve written about current awareness tools.

Through this guide, we have links to several different methods of keeping current with journal articles and databases. We have the New England Journal of Medicine Journal Watch, Mendeley, Web of Science,
automatic delivery of Table of Contents. You can set up RSS feeds, search alerts that are available through PubMed, Embase, and the various EBSCO databases.

Another way you can set up a current awareness search is directly through PubMed. From PubMed I’m going to show you how to set up and create an alert for articles to be emailed to you on a regular basis.

I’ve typed in the search term of otitis media.

I’m interested in getting all of the recent articles on this topic emailed to me so that I don’t have to do a PubMed search each time I would like to find information.

I’m logged in to My NCBI account through PubMed. If you do not have a My NCBI account, you can set one up free of charge through this link of My NCBI.

When you have your search term as you want it in PubMed, you can click on create alert.

And you can see that there are several different options that you can set up an email alert, put in your email address, and then how often you would like to be emailed with new results from your search.

The frequency can be monthly, weekly, daily.

Which day of the week and most importantly how many items you wish to be sent and then you can click on save.

You can also use this as a way of doing a table of contents search. So I could type in New England Journal of Medicine. If I would like to get the table of contents from this journal emailed to me and again you can create alerts and set it up in the same way the frequency, the formatting, and you can save your options there.

So you have a variety of different methods of keeping current of information and research that is available on your topic.

Last modified: 07/19/17