Current Awareness

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Many electronic databases and journals provide a service of regular updates of new articles on a specific topic, author, or journal table of contents. Sent to your email account or RSS reader, these updates are often called 'alerts.' The Science and Engineering Library also provides a new books list that is regularly updated on its website.

Library staff present a one hour, Keeping Current workshop each semester which gives more details on the databases, as well as offering help in setting up an effective search strategy.

Books

The Science and Engineering Library staff creates a regular listing of new books received by the library. You can check the New Books Received page or set up an RSS feed off of that page.

Journal Articles

Here is a listing of many of the databases in the areas of science and engineering that offer the option of setting up a search profile and having periodic listings of articles sent to you or your RSS reader.

Setting up alerts within a database offers the advantage of searching by keyword and covering a variety of publishers with only one search. The emailed results can be imported into a citation manager such as RefWorks.

Database	Updates	Coverage	Alerts	Notes
Web of Science Connect	weekly	Over 8000 journals in the sciences, social sciences & humanities	email, RSS	Also offers citation alerts, you are notified when a new citation is made to an article
BIOSIS Connect	weekly	More than 6500 journals and conferences in the life sciences	email
Compendex Connect	weekly	References from more than 5000 journals, conferences, and technical reports in engineering and applied sciences	email, RSS	Emailed references link you back into the database and aren't accessible from off-campus
Georef Connect	biweekly	Covers more than 3500 journals in the geosciences, as well as conference papers, books, maps and more	email
Inspec Connect	weekly	Over 5000 journals and conferences in the fields of physics, electrical engineering and computer science	email, RSS	Emailed references link you back into the database and aren't accessible from off-campus
NTIS Connect	weekly	US government-sponsored research in science, technology and business	email
PubMed Connect	daily	Citations and abstracts from more than 4800 biomedical journals	email, RSS	You can choose how often you would like to receive updates in a range from daily to monthly

Journal Publishers

Most journal publishers offer the option of being sent alerts when a new issue of journal is published. The specifics vary greatly by publisher, check the publisher web site for more details.

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