Undergraduate and new graduate students commonly ask me, how do you keep up with the literature in your field?!? Usually I laugh in response because most of the time this feels, well, impossibly daunting. Here are some tricks I’ve learned along the way:
Google Scholar Alerts
Set up an email alert for new publications from specific authors or new articles that contain key words/phrases separated by commas. Set up and account, once signed in click on “alerts” in the sidebar menu. You can edit these alerts later adding more key words or authors. I typically pick a theme of something I’m working on and set up an alert with many key phrases so I get a single email alert on that topic.
Journal Alerts
Navigate to specific journal’s homepage and look for a link that generates content alerts (several examples below demonstrate you have to hunt around a bit on the various journal homepages, see bold black arrows). You almost always have to set up a free account and/or login through your university library system. Some journal’s let you decide how often you want to receive alerts and what type of alerts you want others will simply send you the table of contents for each new issue.
Tectonics homepage, second link down on right hand side of page “get content alerts”
Earth Science Reviews homepage, navigate to the bottom of the homepage. Under “Readers” you can select “volume/issue alert”
Journal of South American Earth Sciences homepage, another Elsevier journal but the alerts option is a totally different place!
Science, a generalized AAAS email alert but you can specify what you want to be emailed about!
Happy reading!
Kristina - futureRXdoc team lead