Guidance for Researchers: Current Awareness

Your research area will constantly change, with new developments and projects evolving which you will undoubtedly want to stay abreast of.  Keeping up to date with new research projects not only informs your own research and practice, but it can be useful in identifying people with whom you might want to network or collaborate.  Most databases enable you to register for a personal account, which in turn can allow you to save and re-run searches as well as set up alerts.

Setting up search alerts within databases, such as those provided by EBSCO or ProQuest, ensures that you are notified via email or RSS feed when a new journal article is published which matches your search criteria.

Alternatively a citation alert will notify you by e-mail or by RSS feed when a new journal article citing a specified journal article is published.  This is useful to find out who is reading and citing your published research, or to track a key paper in your field.  Both Web of Science and Scopus allow you to set up this feature.

Reference management tools allow you to collate your references into one place, to create a personalised library of information. There are many out there such as Zotero, EndNote and Mendeley.

Aggregators are online tools that help you draw together disparate information sources and present them as a personalised newsletter. This makes staying on top of latest developments in your field of research much easier. There are many aggregators out there, but Feedly.com is one of the major ones. Items you can collate in an aggregator include:

• RSS feeds
• Newsletters
• Blogs
• Table of Contents alerts
• Database search alerts
• Citation linkers
• Youtube channels

Once the aggregator is populated, the new items are sent to you, and you can link easily back to the original item, and bookmark them to find them later.

Aggregators are available online, and through an app, so  you can follow your feeds through your phone.

As an alternative, if you want to concentrate on following academic journals - https://www.researcher-app.com/ allows you to choose from over 15,000 journals.

Citation Linkers allow you to see the path research follows after publication. A citation linker will list documents produced that use an original reference in their work, thus making it possible for you to see how research is used, and how thoughts progress.

Social media can be extremely useful in keeping on top of new developments and research within your field.  Engaging with other researchers and practitioners on platforms such as Twitter, LinkedIn, and ResearchGate, can provide you with useful networking opportunities as well as raising your own profile within the research community. 

It might be worth looking into the 2011 report from the Research Information Network if you are unsure about whether social media is for you.

Table of Content Alerts are a good way of staying on top of your key journals. Many journal websites offer an alerting service, that informs you when new content is published. This saves you regularly seeking out newly published materials.