Alert Services > Albin O. Kuhn Library & Gallery

Alert Services

Many publishers and distributors of scholarly material offer free online alerting service. It is a good way to keep up-to-date with journals/articles in your area of interest/research. It provides regular electronic notifications to your inbox of newly published research, journal tables of contents and other types information based on user-specified criteria. Free registration is usually required.

Types of Alerting Services

Table of contents alerts
-- email updates of the table of contents of the most current issues of the journals you specify while signing up.
Daily/weekly email alerts
-- notify subscribers of articles matching submitted topics. Alert frequencies vary depending on the publisher's database updates.
Saved search alerts
-- email notifications of recent articles matching previously submitted searches.

A Word about RSS

RSS (Rich Site Summary, Really Simple Syndication or RDF Site Summary) is available from a growing number of electronic resources, including publishers of scholarly material. You can subscribe to the RSS feeds using aggregators such as Blogline.

How to set up alert services

Alert services vary between different databases and publishers, and they often have different names. This can sometimes make it difficult to find the alert services you want.

There are a few ways to find alert services on a database or publisher site:

Look on the home page for options such as "alerts" or "email updates".
Look for options such as "Register", "Create Profile", or "My Account", and read about what kind of alerts are offered if you sign up.
Look for an option to set up an alert when you're on a search results page, or when browsing journal issues and subject categories.
Some databases don't link to alert services from the home page. However, the services are offered once you search or browse.

Please note that this is not a complete list. If you know of such a service and would like to see it added to the list, please let us know. Also if you have trouble setting up the alert services, please contact us.