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

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

This guide is all about how to make your workflow easier!

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 stand for electronic table(s) of contents, an email newsletter service that describes new issues of publications you want to follow. You can either subscribe directly to the journal or, in the case of databases like Project MUSE, manage subscriptions to eToCs for multiple journals simultaneously.

New tools for keeping up are prolific on the modern web. These include IFTTT (If This Then That), a tool with "recipes" that can connect activity that you engage in across multiple apps — for example, by posting RSS feed updates to a Slack channel.