Current Awareness

Browse new library books by month, individual library, language, and subject classification. You can also create a customized RSS feed to get monthly updates.

Table of Contents alerts allow you to be automatically notified when the new issue of a journal is published.

JournalTOCs

The JournalTOCs Tables of Contents service allows you to keep up-to-date with newly published scholarly material by enabling you to browse, view, save, and search across thousands of journal tables of contents from hundreds of publishers. Free registration allow you to create a customized list of your most important and favorite journals, and includes export options such as email alerts, RSS feeds, formats for bibliographic managers, and customizable API for web pages.
Note: With a free personal account there is a limit of 20 journal titles that can be followed.

E-mail (or RSS) alerts from databases subscribed to by Cornell University Library

Examples of vendor databases that include journals from multiple publishers and provide TOC e-mail alerts include:

• EBSCO databases – click on “Publications” link from the toolbar. Browse for journal title and select. Click “”Alert/Save/Share” link on publications page.
• ProQuest databases – click “Publications” tab. Browse for journal title and select. Click “set up alert” or “create RSS feed” from publication page.
• ISI’s Web of Science – conduct a “publication name” search. Click on “Search History”. Click “Save History/Create Alert” button and choose frequency of alert (options are weekly or monthly).
• Publisher-provided TOC alerts – Another option is to sign up for TOC alerts sent directly from publishers of journals or article databases to which Cornell University subscribes. This usually requires creating an individual profile at a publisher’s Web site.

“Have you read this new article?” Word of mouth between colleagues is an excellent way to keep current. Several services attempt to replicate this experience online.

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 browse by subject or tags, and some services allow you to upload files. Here are a couple of examples:

• Bibsonomy
• Diigo

Some citation management programs allow you to share reference lists:

• Zotero – share references with your Zotero contacts
• Mendeley – share references and files with small group of contacts, and view aggregate statistics in your field

A citation alert notifies you when new publications cite a particular work. ISI’s Web of Knowledge offers this service if users create personal profiles.

Subject alerts

Subject alerts allow you to be notified when articles are published that match your subject criteria. For example, after conducting a search in a ProQuest database for the terms “wind power” and “local government”, you could set up an alert to be notified of any new articles that get added to the database with those keyword terms. This service is also available in databases produced by ISI’s Web of Knowledge, EBSCOhost, CSA Illumina, Elsevier (ScienceDirect), Google (Google Scholar) and more.

Web page alerts

Stay up-to-date with new online content in your subject area. There are a number of services that provide alerting services for new publications on the Web, including:

• Google Alerts tracking service for search-engine results that watches for online new content by monitoring Web pages indexed by Google and e-mails users when it locates new items
• The Scout Report – weekly reports offering a selection of new and newly discovered Web resources of interest to researchers and educators
• Conference Alerts – Receive information about upcoming conferences in your areas of interest.