Staying Current

How do you stay current with the literature in your field of study or research?  If you find this a challenging prospect, our librarians have the tools to help.

Staying up-to-date with what is happening in your area of research may take several forms.  Are you interested in having browsing access to the most current volume of a favorite journal or magazine?  Or, would you prefer to receive an email message or RSS feed to newly-published research on a topic of interest?  In similar fashion, would you like to know when your published article is cited by other researchers?  Or, do your enjoy reading blogs and current news from News sites and the popular press?

If any and all of these apply to the information you would like to retrieve and your workflow (more on that question of management, below), note that there are open Web resources and library-licensed tools that can serve this process of keeping current.  A selection of these tools and assists are listed, below, by approach or form.

Table of Contents (your favorite or essential journals)

• Browzine (see our previous post)
• Journal TOCs (free, scholarly journal TOCs)
• Database Alerts (via email or RSS)
• Publisher Websites (some offer free TOCs)

Search and Citation Alerts (your area of research interest or by publication)

• Database Alerts (via email or RSS)
• Google Scholar Alerts (via email with Google Account--either to "My Citations" or to a topic search)
• Google Book Alerts (an option as from the Result Type menu)

Blogs, News Media, Website Updates

• Subscribe to feeds using feed readers or Web browser.

Library Guides, Liaisons and Workshops
You do not need to do this alone.  Speak to your librarians for assistance and customization.  Attend a drop-in workshop or do-it-yourself by reading our Web guides.

• Research Guide to Keeping Current in the Literature
• MyUW, Research Tab (Create a customized, browsing access list of your "Favorite Library E-Resources")

Managing the Information you Retrieve
Campus Libraries provide support for several software products for managing your citations and formatting your reference list.  Evaluate these tools and attend a drop-in workshop to explore their features.  The beauty of these tools is that they can communicate well with library-licensed databases making it relatively easy and efficient to move records from database to manager. 

Have any tips and resources to share?  If so, please reply to this post.

ticTOCS

Stay timely with the research literature by using ticTOCs. ticTOCS is a journal tables of contents (TOCs) service, developed by a consortium of university libraries and publishers, made freely-available online. Search for journals by title, subject, or publisher. The service brings together, as RSS feeds, the Tables of Contents to scholarly journals from more than 300 publishers.

By registering with the service, you can save a set of selected journals (MyTOCS) to view upon logging in. While you may browse these TOCS at the site, you can also export selected journal RSS feeds to a preferred feed reader (Bloglines or Google Reader) or particular article citations to RefWorks (by clicking on the RefWorks icon). Clicking on the article title will initiate a search for full-text as library (institutional) and personal subscriptions or Open Access publishers can accommodate.

As need be, do consult with campus librarians or use the Find It form to confirm subscription access to journals.

Keeping Current, Workshop 2/27

Do you feel overwhelmed by the challenge of keeping up with the literature in your field of study or research? This workshop will share several tools that can help you save time and maximize your efficiency for staying up-to-date with that information.

Learn how to create a custom list of library databases or have table of contents of the most recent journals sent directly to your email.
Be alerted to the most recent articles on a topic.
Monitor Websites, blogs and other important resources with ease.
Keep track of citations and make bibliographies quickly.

The workshop is structured to allow plenty of time for hands-on exploration of resources.

Keeping Current with the Literature
Wednesday February 27 (12:30 - 2:00 PM)
Steenbock Library, Room 105

RSS Journal Feeds (Ebling Library)

Do you use RSS to keep current with the literature in your field of research or study? If so, you may find the journal feeds collected and organized by library staff at Ebling Library to be particularly useful for that purpose. The list of journal feeds ranging from such disciplines as allergy and immunology to genetics and genomics to nutrition and dietetics to virology can be browsed by these subject areas or alphabetically by journal title. Subscribing to each journal feed will furnish a “table of contents” to the most recent edition of that particular journal. A selection of feeds is also supplied to news sources for general health, medicine, NIH research and pharmacy.

There are a variety of feed-readers available for your use including Bloglines or Google Reader, among others. The Ebling journal feed site includes general information about RSS and feed-readers. Additional information about feed-readers can also be found at the campus Libraries’ Alerts and RSS Feeds page.

Keeping Current using RSS Feed-Readers (or News Aggregators)

RSS or "Really Simple Syndication," is an XML format for sharing syndicated information—generally, frequently-changing information—on the Web. RSS enables you to monitor Websites for new information without needing to visit each site or database.

Some RSS readers are freely-available to Web users; these include Bloglines or My Yahoo.

Many news sites and publication Websites supply RSS feeds of new/current information and/or research. Using a feed-reader enables you to view all of these feeds of news and research information in one place. Within a feed-reader, the feed will show a short description with a link to the full content.

Subscribe to a feed by entering the feed's link (URL in browser address bar) into the reader or by clicking an RSS icon to initiate a subscription process.

A subscription maps a feed to the user’s reader. Look for feed links on a feed service page or from a site’s main/home page or look for icons on the page or from within the browser’s URL address bar.

While feeds are commonly found at many news sites (BBC, CNN, Guardian, among many others), feeds are also available from the following research news sites:

Biology News Net

EurekAlert

PLOS (Public Library of Science)

Using the Bloglines Feed-Reader

Visit: http://www.bloglines.com/

Create an account: http://www.bloglines.com/register/

The Bloglines login is your email address; the password you create must be six characters in length (and ideally, not easily guessed).

Once you are logged in, you will be able to subscribe to feeds and to organize them into folders or categories of feed information.

For additional information about RSS readers, see:

http://www.library.wisc.edu/alerts/more-about-rss.html