1. Getting information to come to
you
Current awareness tools for
Philosophy Researchers

2. Current awareness methods
When researching a topic it is vital to make sure you
are keeping up to date. There are some useful methods
for doing this:
• Journal contents email alerting services
• RSS feeds
• Saved searches and search alerts
• Citation alerts
• Social Media

3. 1. Journal contents alerts
http://zetoc.mimas.ac.uk www.tictocs.ac.uk
• British Library service • ticTOCs table of contents
service
• Over 20,000 titles • Over 14,000 titles
• Add journals to your list • Search for journals and save
• Receive alerts by email or to list
RSS feed • View citations and links to
• Easy to use full text (where subscription
allows)
• Export to a RSS reader

4. 2. RSS Feeds
What is RSS?
• “…a format for delivering regularly
changing web content” (Attitude Group,
2011)
• This is usually referred to as a „web feed‟ or
„news feed‟, and makes it possible to subscribe
to content from a site without having to visit the
page to check for updates.
• You need a free RSS reader e.g. Google Reader,
Bloglines

5. What can I use RSS for?
Journal feeds –
Saved searches
Table of
from databases
Contents (TOC)
Publisher feeds
•New books or Blog posts or
research papers updated
•Most read or most websites
cited publications
Latest news RSS Favourite user‟s
bookmarks,
feeds articles or
Reader photos

6. RSS Readers www.google.com/reader
Once you have your account set-up,
Add a new you can add RSS feeds from
subscription using websites and blogs to your reader
this button and view them all in one place.
All subscriptions shown in
this column
New items shown
in bold with
number in
brackets

7. www.netvibes.com
RSS Feeds: Netvibes
• Netvibes is a personalized start page
• Useful for managing RSS feeds- you can subscribe to e.g.
journal contents pages or blogs and view them all on one
page.
• See Philosophy Library‟s Netvibes page below
www.netvibes.com/lewylib#Journals-Latest_Issues

8. 3. Databases: saved searches
• Many Philosophy databases will allow you to create search alerts e.g.
Philosopher‟s Index, Web of Knowledge and Scopus.
• Lets you know about new articles and citations of articles on your topic
• Includes RSS feeds, email alerts and saved searches
2. Click on the
1. Perform a
„Recent searches‟
search in a
link at the top
database
right of the screen
Rerun the 3. Choose to
search as often create an alert or
as you choose. RSS feed.

9. 4. Databases: citation alerts
• Citation alerts can be set up to notify you when a particular journal
article is cited by new articles added to the journal or database (e.g.
Web of Knowledge, Scopus).
• You can choose to receive the alerts by email or RSS feed.
Creating a citation alert in Web of Knowledge

10. 5. Social Media
• Blogs
• Twitter
• Personalised pages
• Social bookmarking

11. Blogs
• Many blogs contain good philosophical content
and discussion.
• A list of many philosophy blogs can be found
here: http://consc.net/weblogs.html
• The Philosophers' Carnival highlights some of
the best philosophical blogging each month
• Two useful blog search engines are:
▫ Technorati
▫ Google Blog Search
• Many blogs have RSS feeds or email alerts

12. http://twitter.com
Twitter
• Microblogging site
• „Follow‟ someone to receive updates
• Search for topics
• Up-to-the-minute philosophy news
• Debate and exchange ideas with others
• John Basl maintains a list of philosophers on
Twitter, which can be browsed or followed:
http://twitter.com/johnbasl/philosophers/mem
bers

13. Social Bookmarking
Social Bookmarking sites allow you to save references and
bookmarks to an online account, which you may choose to share
with others. You may also discover and keep up to date with articles
on your subject by browsing by subject or tags.
Social bookmarking sites include :
• Delicious See the Library‟s delicious page here:
http://delicious.com/phillib
• Connotea Save links to journal articles, websites and other
eresources of interest. Designed for scientists.
Some reference management sites also allow you to share reference
lists, so you can collaborate with other researchers.
• Zotero
• Mendeley

14. Summary
Current awareness tools help you to:
• Save time and effort
• Save and organise items
• Tap into formal and informal sources
• Share information