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Keeping up to date with the latest research in your subject area is an important part of the research process. Developing strategies to support this demonstrates your skills as an independent researcher and ensures your research is relevant and current. With new research published every day, keeping up to date can seem daunting. However, 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 for new articles on a particular topic. Creating an alert means you will receive regular emails with details of 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.
Another useful way of keeping up to date is by creating citation alerts. Many databases allow you to create citation alerts. If you find an article that is particularly relevant to your research 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.
BrowZine presents UCL's academic journal subscriptions in a browsable format. BrowZine is easy to navigate with a user-friendly visual display, which enables users to search by subject area or journal title. By creating an account, users can save journals of interest to their bookshelves and access content with a single click, as well as save articles, create collections to manage saved articles, download PDFs, export citations to reference management software, and share article links. Users can enable notifications to receive emails at frequency of their choosing when new issues of journals saved to their bookshelves become available. Having all your favourite journals in one place saves you time checking individual journals. BrowZine is a useful tool for keeping up to date with relevant journal literature and for organising that content.
BrowZine is also available as an app to download on your smartphone or tablet. The app has the same functionality as the web version, but in convenient app form.
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.
Current Contents Connect is a current awareness database that helps researchers keep up to date by providing access to complete tables of contents, abstracts, bibliographic information, and abstracts from the most recently published issues of leading scholarly journals, as well as from more than 7,000 relevant, evaluated websites. You can use the table of contents alerting to be notified when new issues of your favourite journals are available.
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.
Altmetric is a tool for measuring the impact and engagement of research beyond traditional citations, indexing sources, such as social media (e.g. X, blogs), news publications, and grey literature (e.g. policy documents). You can find more information about tools for analysing research-related metrics in our Research metrics guide.
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:
Find out how to create alerts in Explore from our Explore guide.
