Oxford LibGuides: Clinical Medicine: Keeping up-to-date

Staying up-to-date

New articles appear rapidly in the sciences and it can be hard to stay ahead of interesting research being published in your field. There are a number of tools that can help you with this problem.

Alerting Services

Many bibliographic databases provide alerting services. This allows you to automatically run a pre-defined search on a regular schedule (e.g. weekly or monthly). The results of the search can be e-mailed directly to you or can even be provided as an RSS feed. The SOLO catalogue also allows you to set up search alerts to help you stay updated on new additions to the library collections at Oxford.

There are usually three basic steps to setting up an alert -

Create a personal account for your database of choice so you can save your searches and set preferences.
Define your search criteria.
Opt to create an alert from your search and chose the format for receiving results and the schedule.

Electronic Tables of Contents

Services such as ZETOC produce tables of contents from newly published journal issues. ZETOC allows you to search the contents lists of journals for articles of interest. You can also set up ZETOC to send you a complete list of the latest articles published in your favourite journal(s) via E-mail as new issues appear.

Web 2.0 Resources

There are a number of Web 2.0 resources such as Twitter, Blogs and RSS feeds that can be used to keep up to date with a number of services. Many academic journals and publishers such as 'Nature' provide a range of feeds for broadcasting breaking news and the latest publications in particular fields. The links on the left of the page provide some useful resources.

ORA

The Oxford Research Archive (ORA) collects research output and publications from across Oxford University.

Keeping up-to-date with the Health Care Libraries

You can keep up with developments in services and resources at the Bodleian Health Care Libraries in several ways

The Bodleian Health Care Libraries website
up-to-date information about the library and all services.
The BHCL newsfeed
You can subscribe to our RSS library news feed.
Twitter
Bodleian Health Care Libraries have a Twitter feed which you can follow.