Current Awareness (New Contents Alerting) Services

The Current Awareness (aka New Contents Alerting) Services provide links to the very latest biomedical references in electronic form. Alerts may be created for specific topics/keyworks, authors, tables-of-contents, and even to alert you when an article has been cited. In most cases the results can be automatically sent to your e-mail or provided as an RSS feed.

Below are several of the more popular options for setting up current awareness alerts. Please contact the Reference Desk at 924-5591, or hslref@virginia.edu for help in setting up an alert.

  1. Alerts on Specific Topics

    Ovid
    In MEDLINE and/ or other databases such as Biological Abstracts searches can be set up to run automatically.They will be executed each time the database is updated (MEDLINE is updated weekly). Results can be sent to your e-mail or exported as an RSS feed.

    PubMed
    PubMed’s “My NCBI allows you to set up e-mail alerts that can deliver results daily, weekly or monthly depending on your preference. Updates may also be saved as an RSS feed.

    PubCrawler
    PubCrawler searches the NCBI PubMed (Medline) and GenBank databases daily using your search terms/parameters specified by the users. Frequency can be set to daily or weekly.

    Web of Science
    Covers Science Citation Index Expanded, Social Sciences Citation Index, and Art & Humanities Citation Index. Automatic running of a search strategy is available for this database if your search is saved on their server. Users also have another option to save their searches on a local drive, or saved as an RSS feed.
    ISI My Cited Article alert: an e-mail alert every time the article is cited.

    Ebscohost
    Automatic e-mail alerts can be setup for databases such as CINHAL, PsycInfo and ERIC, RSS feeds are also available. Frequency may be set to daily, weekly, biweekly or monthly. Saved Alerts will stay in your accounts for a year.

  2. Alerts for a Journal's Table of Contents

    After setting up a personal profile, you can set up an automatic notification of new issues. Notices include a link to the table of contents for the current issue, which will include links to the full-text of articles (if an online subscription is available). Notification is typically available through both e-mail and RSS.

    OVID Journals@Ovid
    Ovid provides a quick method to sign up for Tables of Content (TOCs) for about 2500 biomedical journal titles. Results can be sent via e-mail or RSS feed.

    Science Direct

    Wiley Interscience

    HighWire Press

    Other Journal Titles
    For individual journal titles that are not available on the aggregators’ sites, go to the journal’s Website. Most journals will have a link for ”Alerts“. For most of cases, individual registration is required to set up automatic e-mail or RSS alerts.

    Science

    Nature

    New England Journal of Medicine

  3. Citation Alerts

    Web of Science
    Covers biomedical, life and physical sciences, social sciences, and arts & humanities. Create a personal account and add articles to your “My Citd Articles” list. Setting up a Cited Article alert will send, via e-mail or RSS feed, an alert every time your article is cited in a new article.

  4. Other Alerts

    DailyPOEMs
    Delivered by e-mail every Monday through Friday, Daily POEMs are synopses of new clinical evidence carefully filtered for relevance to patient care and evaluated for validity. All POEMs are added to the Daily POEMs database in Essential Evidence Plus. POEM stands for Patient-Oriented Evidence that Matters.

  5. News Alerts

    RSS is a common method to receive news and publication updates. See these instructions for setting up an RSS feed:

    How do I keep up with news in my field (via RSS feeds)

    Staying on Top (PDF)