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Staying Current: keeping up-to-date

Keep up-to-date with new research in your area with journal and book alerts, RSS Feeds, TOC Alerts and Conference Alerts.

Table of content alerts

Table of Contents Alerts generates automatic notifications to let users know that a journal has published a new issue.Choose either email alerts or RSS feed alerts. We recommend you use a dedicated Feed reader or Zotero to read these. Check for the journal you'd like to follow with one of the following.

1. Browzine

 

BrowZine is a tool that help you organize your favorite journals. The current issue is one click away and BrowZine can help you stay up to date in your field.

Create a Browzine account

  1. Start from the library’s Search Tools page
  2. Click BrowZine (App). Download the app for your mobile device.
  3. To set it up from your browser, go to ‘Connect to Browzine’.
  4. Click on the cog at the right of the page to setup your account under settings
  5. Under Browzine Account (Loging to Browzine) click ‘login’ to create a personalised account
  6. Click on Sign up to create a new personalised account
  7. This will allow you to get started and to be able to sync your various devises
  8. From here on you will be able to save Journals to your Bookshelf (maximum of 64 titles) and mark articles to store in ‘my articles’
  9. You can also link your Mendeley account or your Zotero account with Browzine
  10. You can access/ create different Browzine accounts based on other libraries that you visit by clicking ‘Change library’

On your iPad

  1. Go to the App Store and search for Browzine to download the app for your iPad
  2. Open the Browzine app and search for University of Melbourne on the libraries list
  3. Login with you UniMelb username and your UniMelb password
  4. Wait for Browzine to build your bookshelf
  5. Click on ‘My Bookshelf’ or ‘My articles’ to see your previously saved Journals or Articles.

Browzine app features

2. Current Contents Connect

This database provides complete tables of contents from leading scholarly journals and books. It also include evaluated web sites and documents. Current Contents Connect contains subject collections in Agriculture, Biology & Environmental Sciences (ABES); Social & Behavioral Sciences (SBS); Clinical Medicine (CM); Life Sciences (LS); Physical, Chemical & Earth Sciences (PCES); Engineering, Computing & Technology (ECT); Arts & Humanities (AH); Business Collection (BC); Electronics & Telecommunications Collection (EC).

This database complements the features of Web of Science core collection.

3. Journal TOCs alerts

Start by creating a free Journal TOCs account.

Next find journals to follow (in the free service you can follow up to 20) in one of these ways:

  1. Search for journal using search box
  2. Browse by subject area
  3. Browse by publisher

Now that you have journals you are following, get alerts by email or by RSS feeds. Read how to use Zotero to manage your RSS feeds. Download the OPML file with all the feeds together from Journal TOCs and upload that in one step to Zotero.

An OPML file is a text XML file you can use to export your favourite journals all at once to your preferred RSS reader.

Setting Journal TOCs alerts

4. RSS feeds on Zotero

Zotero is a free and easy to use reference management software program. If you are already using Zotero, it makes sense to also use it as RSS reader to keep track of the Journals you follow and saved searches you set up.

A journal RSS feed is a file that publishers put on their website. Normally, it contains the abstracts of the articles published in the most recent issue of the journal. The publisher automatically updates the content of the RSS feed when the journal publishes a new issue with added articles.

 

Zotero's feed feature allows you to use Zotero as a feed manager but by doing that with a reference manager, time is saved to add useful references to your reference library straight away.

Saved database searches accessed as RSS feeds or Journal TOC alerts accessed as RSS feeds either (1) from Journal web pages individually or (2) applications such as Browzine can all be centrally accessed and managed in Zotero.

The advantage of this approach, is that you firstly read and access the feed and secondly choose which article metadata is permanently saved in your library, collections or sub-collections.

Your options for adding feeds to Zotero

  1. Adding individual feed URLs, or
  2. Adding a package of feeds all at once using the OPML file

Setting RSS feeds in Zotero