michigan informatics
Using Automated Update Searches of Journal Literature to Stay Informed
Healthy People 2010 Searches
Helpful librarians and some database providers will sometimes provide canned searches on topics of interest. For example, there are PubMed searches available through the Healthy People 2010 Information Access Project. Select your topic of interest and then click on the PubMed Search icon to find articles related to that specific Health People 2010 objective. Once in PubMed, you can save the search and create an auto-alert via your My NCBI account.
Using a table of contents service is effective if you are focusing on a few journals. If you are trying to staying informed of a topic that might be broadly covered in the health sciences literature, you should employ the strategy of using an automatic update search (also known as auto-alert or SDI – Selective Dissemination of Information) which is available in many databases.
You simply perform a search in your favorite database and set it up so you can receive free e-mail updates of that search. An excellent example of database that has automatic update search is PubMed. By registering for a My NCBI account, you will be given an option to save your searches and receive e-mail updates of new search results from PubMed. If you do not want the e-mail updates, you can still save the search in your my NCBI account and periodically go back to your account to check for new articles at your convenience.
The strategy of automatically updated searches may require more effort in constructing a good search strategy within the database. However, you can start receiving e-mail updates only for new journal articles that match your search. You can set up a search to track the new articles of a specific author, a specific institution, a specific journal, or a specific topic. The possibilities are endless.
Take some time to explore the selected example of automated updated searches for journal literature.
- PubMed
If you are affiliated with an academic institution, contact your local librarian to see if you have access to your institution’s full-text journal articles through PubMed’s Linkout feature.
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