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Guides & Tutorials: Current Awareness What are current awareness services? Current awareness services are tools you can use to keep up to date with the latest professional literature in your field of interest. There are a few different types of current awareness services available and different information providers may refer to their current awareness tools using different names. Search alert services allow you to automatically run saved database searches with the results delivered directly to your email or to the Health SmartLibrary (HSL) home page. Citation alert services enable you to track new articles that cite an article you have chosen by sending you an e-mail every time the article has been cited. Journal Issue or Table of Contents (TOC) services are offered by many professional journals. With TOC alerts the latest table of contents is sent to you via e-mail or RSS feed. RSS Feeds push updates of web pages and blogs to your RSS reader so you don't have to check each individual site for updates. For more information, see our guide to RSS and Atom Feeds. Here are some of the more popular services available with step-by-step instructions on how to use each.
The Stay Current feature of the Health SmartLibrary can be used as a search alert service or as a tool to track the latest five articles added to PubMed from specific journals. Stay Current always appears in the right-hand column of the Galter Library home page. You can use Stay Current to construct current awareness searches which run automatically in PubMed every day with results delivered directly to your HSL home page after you’ve logged in to the web site. Like any current awareness service, the challenge is to create the best search strategy that will retrieve your desired results. Since Stay Current searches PubMed, you may retrieve better results if you first search PubMed and then copy your search statement to the Stay Current search once you’ve determined that your search strategy will retrieve the results you seek.
There are two ways to keep up to date with PubMed. You can either create a My NCBI account and create email alerts or you can create an RSS feed based on your search terms and have the results delivered to your RSS reader.
To use My NCBI:
You can also set up RSS feeds to automatically retrieve the latest articles into your RSS reader. To set up a feed:
Ovid offers a current awareness service called AutoAlert (SDI). "SDI" is the acronym for selective dissemination of information. Your search strategy, saved as an AutoAlert (SDI) in Ovid, will be run automatically whenever the database it searches is updated. The newest citations that meet the saved search criteria are emailed automatically to your e-mail address. When you created your Health SmartLibrary account, you were asked “Would you like a personal OVID account to save searches and/or receive OVID auto-alerts?” Before you can save searches and create AutoAlerts in Ovid you must be sure that you answered “yes” to this question. If you’re not sure, log in to HSL, and choose “Personal Information” from the “Customize” menu. To set up an AutoAlert:
Use PubCrawler to set up current awareness searches for PubMed and other NCBI databases such as GenBank. With this service, you can choose how often you want your queries to run in PubMed. To use PubCrawler:
See the PubCrawler FAQ for more information. ScienceDirect is an information provider with a searchable gateway containing links to individual Elsevier electronic journals. Three current awareness options are available through ScienceDirect: Search Alerts, Journal Issue Alerts, and Citation Alerts. You must create a personal ScienceDirect account to initiate any of these services. Please note that your search alerts will be limited to only those journal titles available through ScienceDirect.
You can save literature searches using Web of Science just like you would in any of the other alerting services. Web of Science also offers a citation alert service. If you want to be informed every time an article is cited, you should use the Citation Alert feature in Web of Science. With this feature, you specify the article(s) to be monitored and an email will be sent to you every time that article is cited.
Faculty of 1000 is an online literature evaluation service, offering a systematic and comprehensive approach to identifying important research in the biological sciences. Researchers provide commentaries and evaluations of the most important papers they read, typically submitting 2-4 commentaries per month. To create an alert in Faculty of 1000:
In addition to the current awareness services mentioned above you should also note that many publishers offer journal issue or table of contents alert services. Take a look at the web site of your favorite journals to find out how to initiate these services.
If you would like additional information please contact the Galter
Library Education Team at 312-503-8109 or galter-ed@northwestern.edu.
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