Keeping up to date with research

Short guide to the tools

• What does keeping up to date mean?• Alerting services:

• Book alerts• News alerts• Discover• Citation alerts• Journal alerts (TOCs ): Zetoc

• Keeping up to date with social networking tools

What does it mean?

• The Internet is connecting everything up, including things like TVs, washing machines, shopping orders and heating systems.

• We no longer need to visit individual websites to check for new content, we can use tools instead to harvest information for us.

• News, Alerts and Social Networking can all do the same thing now, so you can choose your preferred tool and keep everything in one place.

This session will help you to decide what tools you might use.

How to start? All you need is an email address, but you can use any of these popular bookmarking tools too:

What is an alert?

“A service which a user can subscribe to which delivers electronic news on a regular basis, or whenever an event of interest to the user occurs.”Ince, D. alerting service. In A Dictionary of the Internet. : Oxford University Press. Accessed: 12 May. 2014, from http://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780191744150.001.0001/acref-9780191744150-e-86 .

Q. But why do I need to register

for a personal profile when I am already using my University username and password?

A. Because it is a

personal service, not

linked to the

University!

At Leeds Beckett…

• The Library subscribes to lots of information not freely available online.

• New resources are added all the time: new editions of books; new articles from journals are made available; news keeps being reported and stories get updated as time passes.

How can we manage all this information?• Oh don’t forget all the free info too!

• Choose an information service, e.g. Web of Science, Discover, Google Scholar, Emerald… Look on the site for “alerts”. Use your email address to sign up. You might like to create a separate email account just for your research.

• OR Set up a professional account, using e.g. Academia.edu, Wordpress, del.icio.us or Digg for example, to set up search alerts and collect your feeds. You can set these to private – so no one else can see anything.

• Just remember to check this single place

when you want to access new research.

How do I start?

Use Library services

• Web of Science• Discover• Google Scholar• Emerald

All these, and more, offer personal services. Choose a subject specific database or try Discover if you can’t choose.

Use a tool

• Academia.edu http://support.academia.edu/customer/portal/articles/1388736-following-and-unfollowing-other-researchers

• Wordpress.com create your own blog, then follow other blogs of professionals/businesses…etc

• Delicious.com Discover, share, and organize the hottest links online

• Digg.com http://digg.com/reader dedicated RSS/alert collector and organiser and it even collects from your Twitter, Facebook, Google+ accounts

Specific alerting options

• New book alerts -Alerts you to new books!

• Table of contents -Alerts you to the content of new issues of your favourite journals or magazines

• Subject -Alerts you when your specified search term/s appear

• Citation -Alerts you when an item is added to the database that cites a specified research article

• Specialised alerts - new patents, standards, etc.

• Professional blogs - that you can follow,

or make your own!

Examples of tools to identify new books published on your topic:• Google Book Alerts• ACQWEB Directory of Publishers

This directory may help you check individual publishers’ websites for new book alerts, such as

– Cambridge University Press– Open University Press– Oxford University Press– Springer– Wiley Blackwell

Book alerts

News Sources

General news sources:• PressReader http://www.pressreader.com/• Nexis www.lexisnexis.com

Professional/trade news sources • Economia • Nursing Times• Times Higher Education Supplement

Remember to log in through the Library website

to access our subscription, then create a personal account.

If you create an individual profile in research databases or tools, your searches can be stored on their system. You can then:

• Visit the site from anywhere with an internet connection • Choose to re-run the search periodically • Set up Email Alerts so that any updates matching your search

criteria are sent to you automatically.

Many research tools / databases will allow you to set up alerts including, for example:

– Emerald– Taylor & Francis Online– PubMed– IngentaConnect– Discover

Create search alerts 1 Databases

Create search alerts 2 You can create alerts so you are informed when new information matches your needs. We will look at Discover as an example, but all websites and databases offer this function and are accessed in a very similar way.

In Discover run a search and then click the Share option at the top right of the list of results for this option:

Discover

Saving results• You can save search results to either a permanent or a temporary folder. • To save a search permanently, you must create an EBSCO account. See

top right “Save my results” and choose to create a new account

To save records from

your results list click

the ‘Add to Folder’ link

Once you have saved a search this way, it can be accessed from any device or location.

Discover

Discover guide: http://libguides.leedsbeckett.ac.uk/resources/discover

Google Scholar offers email alerts. • Run a search, then look for the Create alert icon to send results to

your email account.

Create search alerts 3 Google

Citation alerts

• Search for an article with Google Scholar. In the bottom left of the article's citation will be a Cited by field. 

• Once you view the articles that cite your original search you can create alert. It will confirm your Alert query and email address before you can create the alert.

Google

Create search alerts 4

• ZETOC (British Library Table Of Contents) is one of the world’s most comprehensive research databases. You can set up personalised email Zetoc Alerts or RSS feeds to track the latest articles or journal titles related to your interests.

• Journal TOCs (Tables Of Content) allows you to save your TOCs in your MyTOCs account or export them to your feed reader.

Research tools

Citation alerts

Set up an email alert or RSS feed to find out when someone cites research, using:

• Scopus - Just to complicate things, Scopus require you to use your University log in!

• Web of Science : A collection of databases including:

• Science Citation Index,• Arts and Humanities Citation Index, • Social Science Citations Index, and• Conference Proceedings Citation Index

Research tools

RSS?

• The RSS (Rich Site Summary) reader is no more, because the other reader tools we use do the same job. Anywhere you see the RSS logo (top right) you can set up to push content out to your current tool…look for the other logos now…

• Our favourites, which you can use on your PC, Android or Apple device are– G+– Feedly– LinkedIn– Pinterest– Flipboard– Digg

• You can even use a Blogger blog to remember the

professional resources you use…

Networking tools

Communicate with colleagues and other professionals, for example:

• Expose your research to a global audience by including it in Leeds Beckett’s Institutional Repository

• Share research on Academia.edu • JiscMail UK (and some international) academic email

discussion lists• LinkedIn, a business-related social networking site, can

help you connect with other researchers and colleagues across the world.

Research tools

Networking tools

• Referencing software: Some software allows you to collect, organise, cite, sync and collaborate all in one place. For example EndNote Online, Flow, Mozilla, Zotero

• Communities: ResearcherID is a global, multi-disciplinary scholarly research community.You can view an author’s citation metrics instantly. Search the registry to find collaborators, review publication lists and explore how research is used around the world.

Research tools

Networking tools

• Blogs. Set up a research blog using a popular free blogger like Blogger, Tumblr and WordPress. You can share or store documents, images, hyperlinks, audio and video recordings. You can choose to keep it private or share with a community.

• Google account apps such as Google+, Hangouts and Communities.

These services can be powerful communities of practice, linking people far and wide, and enabling collaboration, support and even job opportunities.

Research tools

Today we have looked at: What does keeping up to date mean? Keeping up to date with alerting services

Book alerts News alerts Discover Citation alerts Journal alerts (TOCs ): Zetoc

Keeping up to date with social networking tools Share your research Store your research Promote your research

Further Help

• Make an appointment with your Academic Librarian

• Library Online Information for Researchers

• Google account apps