Current Awareness Strategies

What's Current Awareness? It's developing a strategy for staying abreast of the latest advances or developments in the published literature in your subject areas of interest and goes along with continuing education in your profession.

How do I stay current? The most popular plan is to set up automatic alerts - either eTOCS (electronic journal tables of contents) or Saved Searches AKA Subject Alerts, like the old SDIs - which you may receive by email or RSS Feeds. The great news is that eTOCS and Search Alerts are free!

Two kinds of eTOCS
1. Set up a free account at individual journal's Web sites, such as The New England Journal of Medicine: http://content.nejm.org/ or The Medical Letter: http://medicalletter.org/html/email_notification.htm

2. Set up an account to receive tables of contents of multiple journals from publisher's sites such as OvidSP: http://gateway.ovid.com/ Science Direct: http://www.sciencedirect.com/ or PubMed Central: http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/

Receive automatic updates on subject searches:
1. Run a search on a database such as Science direct, CINAHL or PubMed and save the search or select "Alerts." Set up your free account. With PubMed set up NCBI account.
2. Go to a journal Web site and look for search box, save search, then sign in or set up free account.

2. Get results by email or RSS Feeds
After selecting journal titles or saving search subject, you'll be asked for delivery method. You might want to just type in your email address where updates will be sent, or -
Set up an RSS Reader! the major way to do this is to either register at Google Reader using your existing Google account or register with Bloglines.

3. Some basic info on RSS (Really Simnple Syndication) Journal updates and search results will arrive right to your reader - Basically you can log in from any computer with an Internet connection or cell phone with Web access. Or, you may have a site's feed automatically sent to the RSS reader built into your web browser - but accessible only from that one computer.

Stay tuned for more information on why and how to use a RSS Feeder!