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Current Awareness Services

It is vital for researchers and academics to keep up-to-date with the most recently published information and developments. A selection of current-awareness services is outlined below. For more help, contact the Cornell Library's Current Awareness team at culaware-l@cornell.edu with your question or to set up a consultation.

New Books at Cornell Table of Contents (TOC) Alerts Social Bookmarking
Blogs RSS Feeds Other Alerts

  New Books at Cornell

New Books at Cornell - allows you to browse new library books by month, individual library, language, and subject classification. You can also create a customized RSS feed to get monthly updates.

  Table of Contents (TOC) alerts

Table of Contents alerts allow you to be automatically notified when the new issue of a journal is published.

  • ticTOCs - The ticTOCs Journal Tables of Contents service allows you to keep up-to-date with newly published scholarly material by enabling you to display, store, combine and reuse thousands of journal tables of contents from multiple publishers. Free registration allow you to create a customized list of your most important and favorite journals. Includes exporting options such as RSS feeds and formats for bibliographic managers. More information, including an instructional video, is available on the library's Introduction to ticTOCs page.
  • E-mail (or RSS) alerts from databases subscribed to by the Cornell University library. Examples of vendor databases that include journals from multiple publishers and provide TOC e-mail alerts include:
    • EBSCO databases - click on "Publications" link from the toolbar. Browse for journal title and select. Click ""Alert/Save/Share" link on publications page.
    • ProQuest databases - click "Publications" tab. Browse for journal title and select. Click "set up alert" or "create RSS feed" from publication page.
    • ISI's Web of Science - conduct a "publication name" search. Click on "Search History". Click "Save History/Create Alert" button and choose frequency of alert (options are weekly or monthly).
  • Publisher-provided TOC alerts - Another option is to sign up for TOC alerts sent directly from publishers of journals or article databases to which Cornell University subscribes. This usually requires creating an individual profile at a publisher's Web site.

  Social Bookmarking (and beyond)

"Have you read this new article?" Word of mouth between colleagues is an excellent way to keep current. Several services attempt to replicate this experience online.

Social Bookmarking sites allow you to save references and bookmarks to an online account, which you may choose to share with others. You may also browse by subject or tags, and some services allow you to upload files. The following services, in particular, are intended for academic use:

Some citation management programs allow you to share reference lists:

  • RefWorks - share references with others at Cornell, using RefShare
  • Zotero - share references with your Zotero contacts
  • Mendeley - share references and files with small group of contacts, and view aggregate statistics in your field

  Blogs

Blog is a shorthand form of the word Weblog. Blogs began as online personal journals but have emerged as broader web tools with many potential applications. A blog can be an effective current awareness tool because of its ability to communicate timely information. Blogs have several advantages over traditional web sites: they allow for direct participation and feedback; they are typically updated more frequently; they tend to be more informal and personal. In conjunction with RSS feeds, most blogs offer a subscription feature that allows for content to be sent directly to subscribers.

For more general information about blogs, see the Blogging Library Guide published by the Cornell University Library.

Several blogs have been created by Cornell Library staff, including:

  RSS Feeds

RSS (some people say it stands for Rich Site Summary, some people say it stands for Really Simple Syndication) is a format for publishing web content. It's used to "push" timely information and updates to people who subscribe to RSS "feeds". What's so cool about it is you can collect a bunch of feeds in one place (your reader or news aggregator), log in whenever you like, and see what's new. You don't have to visit all the web sites one at a time, and you don't have to waste your time with old news.

See the library's guide to Keeping Current with News and Research for a more detailed explanation of RSS.

  Other Alerts

  • Citation alerts - A citation alert notifies you when new publications cite a particular work. ISI’s Web of Knowledge offers this service if users create personal profiles.
  • Subject alerts - Subject Alerts allow you to be notified when articles are published that match your subject criteria. For example, after conducting a search in Proquest for the terms “wind power” and “local government”, you could set up an alert to be notified of any new articles that get added to the database with those keyword terms. This service is also available in databases produced by ISI’s Web of Knowledge, EBSCOhost, CSA Illumina, and more.
  • Web page alerts - Stay up-to-date with new online content in your subject area. There are a number of services that provide alerting services for new publications on the Web, including:
    • Google Alerts - a tracking service for search-engine results that watches for online new content by monitoring Web pages indexed by Google and e-mails users when it locates new items
    • The Scout Report - weekly reports offering a selection of new and newly discovered Web resources of interest to researchers and educators
  • Conferences - Locating papers delivered at conferences can sometimes be difficult, but they are often the only record of vital new research results. Some conference listings include: