Health Information Online

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Keeping up to date

There are many services to help you keep up to date. Many publishers will allow users to sign up to a free alerting service which emails the table of contents of journal issues to you, whenever an issue is published. Similarly, you can set up an auto-alert in a bibliographic database e.g. MEDLINE, CINAHL and saved it .

Current awareness tools

Keeping up to date

eTOC (Table of Contents) alerting services

Sign up for Tables of Contents from lots of journals at once:

  • JournalTocs is a free online service which provides tables of contents and offers RSS feeds for new content, for over 16 000 journals.  It will email you with details of new articles as they are published and often includes an abstract.

Database search alerts

Once you have carried out a search in a bibliographic database such as MEDLINE or CINAHL you can save your search and set up an auto-alert.

When the databases are updated you will automatically be notified - by getting an email or through an RSS feed - when new content is added which fits your original search.

This feature is available from all healthcare databases.

You need to conduct your search, and then click on "save" then "save and create alert". You can select the format and frequency of the alert. You should contact your local healthcare library for support with setting up these alerts.

Current awareness bulletins

A number of health library services produce current awareness bulletins, containing articles and news.

See Londonlinks Current Awareness section for examples.

Further information and support contact your local healthcare library.