| What is current awareness? | Free Web Sites for Alerts (email and rss) |
As part of your oath as a health professional, you make a promise to improve your knowledge and awareness of your profession throughout your career. Keeping up with current developments is crucial to your continuous professional development. The most basic step to staying abreast of developments is to monitor the professional literature. You will receive some publications because of your membership in professional organizations. You may also choose to read other publications either by subscribing to them or accessing them through your hospital or other health sciences library.
Once you know what journals and professional publications you want to monitor, you can use the Internet to automate your current awareness activities. You can do this by setting up automatic alerts for tables of contents of specific journals, announcements of new books, or searches on specific subjects.
These sites can alert you to new publications on a particular subject or to new issues of a particular journal.
1. RSS Feeds
Find a journal's rss feed - Database of titles maintained by the University of Wisconsin - Madison's Ebling Library.
Rss (really simple syndication) allows you to collect journal alerts in a single location without having them emailed to you. To do this you need a tool on the web called a feed reader (or rss reader) and you need a URL for each rss page you want to add to your feed reader. You will probably have one URL for each journal you want to view. See more on how to set up an rss feed and suggestions of some services to use. In addition to these feed services, you can also use the special rss tools in your web browser. Consult your particular browser's help screens to find out more about rss feeds. Once you have a feed reader, you will find the rss feed URL at the journal's website. Note: Most of the high profile journals have rss feeds, but not all journals provide this service.
2. Email Services
My
NCBI
My NCBI is Pubmed's tool for saving Medline searches and
results, and it features an option to automatically update and e-mail search results
from your saved searches. My NCBI includes additional features for
filtering
search results and setting Linkout and document delivery preferences.
You can choose how often you want to receive results.
Amedeo
This
service allows you to select general medical topics and/or specific
journals.
Pubcrawler:
http://pubcrawler.gen.tcd.ie/
PubCrawler is a free "alerting" service that scans daily updates to the NCBI Medline (PubMed) and GenBank databases. PubCrawler helps keeping scientists informed of the current contents of Medline and GenBank, by listing new database entries that match their research interests.
Caution: You will receive an email every day. This is most useful if
you are working on research project, and want to be informed about every
new relevant article.
Lead
Discovery
Daily email of breaking publications from PubMed judged to
be of importance to the drug development community
In addition, you can sign up to receive tables of contents from most journals. Visit the journal's webist to sign up for this service.