RSS Readers, Article Alerts, and New Ways to Keep Up: HOME

How do you keep up with what is important to you?

RSS is a way to get updates from your favorite web sites, academic publications, news sources, and podcasts without needing to visit each web site individually to check for content. Using an RSS reader, you can streamline the way you receive content updates to make yourself more informed and less overburdened with irrelevant information.

Article alerts are features included in many databases. Alerts allow you to refine a search, save it, and have the results of that search emailed to you periodically. Unlike being on a table of contents mailing list, the alerts are actually relevant to the specific topic of interest to you.

eToCs are an email newsletter-like service. You can either subscribe directly to the journal or, in the case of databases like Project MUSE, manage subscriptions to eToC services for multiple journals simultaneously.

New methods for finding articles include a lot of start-up companies designed to help you discover content. They often bill themselves as replacements to the e-Table of Contents. Some people like their advanced tools, yet others prefer having everything in one place (their email account).