Keep up to date with alerts and social media. Watch this short introduction to the tools and techniques that might give you the edge when sharing research, collaborating, and researching for your studies.

1. Keeping up to date
with research

2. 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

3. 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:

4. 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 .

5. 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!

6. • 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?

7. 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.

8. 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

9. 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!

10. 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

11. 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.

12. 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

13. 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

14. 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
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

15. 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

16. 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

17. 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

18. 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

19. 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…

20. 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

21. 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

22. 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

23. 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

24. Further Help
• Make an appointment with your Academic
Librarian
• Library Online Information for Researchers
• Google account apps