What are Current Awareness Services?
Thousands of journal articles are published each week and it is impossible
to keep up to date with the amount of information being produced.
Current awareness services attempt to help the researcher by alerting
the individual, via e-mail, about new journal articles in a specific
subject area. The current awareness services are provided by big publishing
groups such as Blackwells.
You will be e-mailed the table of contents from particular journals
or receive details of articles which match some pre-defined search
criteria such as an author's name or keywords from the title. These
e-mails will be sent on the day the new data is loaded into the publishers'
database.
Three of these services are well worth the time taken in order to
subscribe to them. They are free of charge.
1. ScienceDirect Search Alerts
Produced by Elsevier Publishing
As with all the current awareness services you will be asked to
log on giving such information as your name and e-mail address. You
will receive a Username and Password which will allow you to:
SARA is also an e-mail service which is designed to deliver tables
of contents from any of the Taylor and Francis journal publications.
You can select to receive alerts by keyword, title, sub-category or
main category. If you sign up to a main category e.g. Geography, you
will receive a high volume of alerts. There are over 750 academic peer-reviewed
journals across a variety of disciplines published by the T & F
Group.
This is a pay-per-view service. It supplies access to 5,400+ full-text
online publications and claims to provide researchers with access to
the most comprehensive collection of academic and professional content
available online.
Ingenta allows you to search its huge database free of charge. If you
want to order the full-text of any article online, you will be told
how much it costs and it can be ordered online. Costs are about 25 euro
per article. But often the paper copy of the journal will be held in
College Library or available through Inter Library Loan (6.50 per article
from the British Lending Library but this will take 10 working days
via snail mail)
However Ingenta also offers a free current awareness service. You may
create and maintain up to 5 free e-journal table of contents alerts.