Conducting a thorough literature search can be very satisfying. Unfortunately it can go out of date almost as soon as it is complete. During the course of your research you'll need to monitor new publications in your field to ensue that your thesis cites current debates and reflects on the latest research.
Use the tabs below to explore how you can set up alerts for different types of publications and to keep on top of new opportunities.
To set up an alert in iDiscover, first login to your account (link on the top right of the screen).
Then conduct a search. Choose 'Cambridge Libraries Collections' for books and 'Articles and online resources' for articles. From the resuls screen, click on 'Save Query'.
Both these steps are highlighted in the image.
A pop up box will appear at the top of the screen. This informs you that the search has been saved to your account.
Also in the box is a link to 'Turn on notification for this query'.
Click on this link to reveive email alerts every time somthing new is added iDiscover that matches your search terms.
Finally a pop up box appears. This is pre-populated with your Cambridge email address, though you can alter this. You can also name your query. Choose something meaningful, in case you set up several alerts. You may wish to date it to help you remember when you first conducted the search.
BrowZine gives you the ability to browse journal titles in subject areas of relevance to you. They are organised by subject taxonomy so you can drill down what is useful to you; you don't need to know the title before searching. It is integrated with our subscriptions, so you will be able to read what you find on there.
You can then organise those journals on virtual 'shelves' according to topics defined by you. BrowZine then updates you with new articles published in these journals and clearly displays unread articles new to your bookshelf. Create a free account to set up alerts to be notified by email of new articles in the journals that you follow.
It integrates with Zotero and Mendeley to make it easy to save relevant articles.
JournalTOCs claims to be the biggest searchable collection of scholarly journal Tables of Contents (TOCs). It contains articles' metadata of TOCs for over 35,862 journals directly collected from over 3800 publishers. this means it is more liely to be up to date than ZETOC. It also specialises in Open Access material, meaning you might be more likely to have access to newly published material
If you want to search the news for your topic search Factiva. To limit: select 'Source' and then 'Major News and Business Sources'. Choose the region you are interested in. You can then select particular titles if you want to limit your search. We do not recommend setting up alerts as they are linked to the shared university account. Instead, it is best to store your search string and rerun it at regular intervals.
Stay up to date with key stories in the news by reading Cambridge's research magazine Horizons. The Conversation is an independent source of news and views, sourced from the academic and research community and aimed at the public.
To find out about what is going on in Higher Education, you could try these services:
Social media is also a great way for researchers to stay up to date. See our tab on Developing Your Digital Footprint
Unless otherwise stated, this work is licenced under a CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 licence by Wolfson College Cambridge.
