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Keeping up to date with the latest research in your subject area ensures your research is relevant and current. There are a number of tools and services available that can help. These include:
One of the best ways of keeping up to date is by setting up alerts or notifications for relevant databases and journals.
Most databases that index journal literature will allow you to set up email alerts, with details of new articles that match your initial search query, saving you time repeating the search. Many databases also allow you to set up alerts by author and journal so that you can keep up with prominent researchers and publications in your field. To set up an alert you will need to create a personal account with the database or journal publisher.
KnowledgeShare is a service that allows your library to share newly published healthcare information with you via email. These evidence updates are highly targeted and based on your interests. You can adjust the frequency of these updates or turn them off at any time.
You can access this service via NHS OpenAthens and self-register, or alternatively contact your home UCL-NHS library to request an account.
If you find an article that is particularly relevant to your research, in some databases you can set up an alert to be notified whenever it is cited in another publication. This is a useful way of finding other research that may be of interest to your own.
Table of Contents (TOC) alerts notify you when new issues of your selected journals are published.
Journal TOCs is the largest, free collection of scholarly journal Table of Contents (TOCs): 33,123 jourmals, including 16, 657 selected Open Access journals and 11,745 Hybrid journals, from 3447 publishers. Journal TOCs is a current awareness service enabling you to discover the newest papers the moment they are published. You can browse the latest journal table of contents, follow your favourite journals and set up email alerts for when new issues of journals you follow are published.
BrowZine presents your Trust's academic journal subscriptions in a user-friendly browsable format. By creating an account, users can save journals of interest to their 'bookshelves' and can enable notifications to receive emails when new issues become available. BrowZine is also available as an app, with the same functionality as the web version.
Select your Trust for a direct link to Browzine.
Browzine is also available as an app on the Apple app store, Google Play, and Amazon appstore.
Attending academic conferences is a good way to keep up to date with new developments in your field as they are often the first place where academics share new research. Conferences are a good opportunity to get feedback on your research and meet other researchers working in the same area. You can find out about relevant conferences by joining subject-specific academic mailing lists, following academic research societies or institutes that organise conferences on social media or by creating alerts with websites that list conferences.
Social media has become a key way of keeping up to date with new research as many academics, research institutes and publishers have a social media presence, which they use to promote their research output and make connections with those working in similar fields.
Academic social networking sites, such as Academia.edu and ResearchGate allow researchers to share their research output, network with other academics, and track their impact.
Academic mailing lists enable researchers working in the same field to discuss their research interests, collaborate, and share information about new publications, including calls for papers for special issues of journals and chapter contributions for edited books, announce conferences and other events, and share job and research funding opportunities. JISCMail is the main provider of academic mailing lists. You can find relevant mailing lists by searching by category.
Repositories are useful for keeping up to date in your subject area because they provide free access to newly published materials as well as often containing journal articles, working papers and datasets which may not yet have been formally published. See our guide to repositories:
