Page 92 - DLIS006_INFORMATION SOURCES AND SERVICES

Unit 5: Alerting and Bibliographic Services

5.1.3 Monitoring Research Topics using Email Alerts or RSS Feeds Notes

You might decide that you want to monitor newly published articles on a particular research
topic in which case it is usually a good idea to set this up in a Citation or Full-text Database, as
this sort of database is not restricted to the journals published by a particular publisher and will
allow you to throw as wide a net as possible to gather articles on your topic. You will likely have
to go through several steps where you register to create a profile, conduct a search, save it to
your profile, and request that the search be automatically and periodically run against any new
content added to the journal or database so the results can be sent to your email or feed reader.
The exact steps will depend on the publisher, vendor, or database provider.

Example: Setting up an email alert to monitor topic results in Zoological Record
You will need to register with ISI Web of Knowledge (the name of the search interface for
Zoological Record) in order to set up an email alert. To register, just click on the link to
Zoological Record from the Library’s Citation & Full-text Databases page. You’ll see a
link at the top of the resulting screen to “Sign In.” Click that, and then click the link to
“Register” in the section called “Customize Your Experience.” Register in order to set up
a login and password for yourself.
Now, let’s say you were interested in having any new articles on the species Mugil trichodon
sent to you by email as they are added to the database. Go to Zoological Record and
conduct a search on this species. Once your search is done, click on the “Search History”
link at the top of the results page. You’ll then see a link to “Save History/Create Alert” -
click this and log in. On the next page you will see that you can name the search, and make
adjustments to the format, etc. Make sure to check off the box that says “Send me email
alerts.” When you have finished making selections on this screen, click on the “Save”
button to save your history to the server. You will now get monthly emails letting you
know if anything new has been added to the database matching your search criteria.

Example: Subscribing to an RSS feed to monitor topic results in Zoological Record
You will first have to register and establish a profile in order to set up RSS feeds in
Zoological Record. Information about how to register is provided in the example above.
You’ll also need to conduct a search on a topic within the database – go through the same
steps described above, but this time try doing your search on amphibia. When you get to
the page where you name your search and make other adjustments, don’t click on the box
that says “Send me email alerts.” Make all the other adjustments that you want on this
page, and then click on the “Save” button to save your history to the server. On the
resulting page, click on the link that says “RSS Feed: XML.” Then copy the URL of the next
screen. Now open your feed reader and look for options to add a new feed (in Google
Reader, click on the link to “Add subscription.” You will be prompted to paste in the URL
of your feed, which is the URL you just copied.

5.1.4 Monitoring Journals Using Email Alerts or RSS Feeds

It is usually quite easy to set up monitoring of journals important to your research many
publishers have a direct link for setting up either an email alert or RSS feed on the home page of
the journal. Often it just takes one click to request that tables-of-contents be automatically sent
to your feed reader, while sending this information to your email account is more likely to
require that you first register with the publisher to create a profile (once you have done so, in the
future you will only need to sign in to your account to add another journal to monitor).

LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY 87