Keeping up to date in your topic area: Databases

https://wok.mimas.ac.uk/ 

Web of Science (WoS) contains records of journal articles over the complete range of science, social science and the arts. It focuses on the most important journal titles in each subject. It is good for building up a detailed subject search strategy and then setting up a regular alert (weekly or monthly) notifying you of new papers added to the database retrieved by the strategy you have created.

Please note that in order to set up alerts in Web of Science, you first need to set up your own individual WoS username and password using the Register button.

The Web of Science platform gives access to several databases including the Web of Science Core Collection (citation indexes covering all subjects and conference proceedings), Medline (biomedical sciences) and BIOSIS Previews (biological abstracts).

You can search one or all of these databases and save your searches to re-run against the latest updates to the databases.

You can also set up citation alerts (so that you are notified when someone cites your key articles). 

• Useful quick reference guide on using Web of Science.
• Useful training videos from Web of Science.

https://www.scopus.com/

Scopus is a large bibliographic database covering all subjects which includes selected conference proceedings and over 34,000 journals.

Scopus allows you to set up alerts for particular authors, documents so that you are notified when someone cites a particular article, or searches.

Searches can be for a range of criteria including keywords, journal title, and an author’s affiliation.

Scopus tutorials

Scopus tutorials provide a visual and audio tour of Scopus and its functions. 

Scopus tutorials - Scopus: Access and use Support Center (elsevier.com)

https://www.journaltocs.ac.uk/ 

JournalTOCs is the largest, free collection of scholarly journals Tables of Contents (TOCs).

JournalTOCs User Guides and Videos

https://www.jstor.org/

Multi disciplinary archive of academic journals, books and pamphlets.

JSTOR user guide for students

https://scholar.google.com/

Google Scholar can be a useful tool. Google Scholar is a Web search engine that specifically searches scholarly literature and academic resources. It searches the same kinds of scholarly books, articles, and documents that you search in the Library's catalogue and databases. The scholarly, authoritative focus of Google Scholar distinguishes it from ordinary Google.

There is overlap between the content in Google Scholar and the Library's individual databases. In addition, many citations in Google Scholar will link to full text in the Library's databases or in publicly available databases.

Searching is as easy as searching in regular Google.

Like regular Google, Google Scholar returns the most relevant results first, based on an item's full text, author, source, and the number of times it has been cited in other sources. Some actions are a little different from regular Google: clicking on a title may only take you to a citation or description, rather than to the full document itself. Google Scholar will not necessarily get you to the full text of every search result.

To find the full document, look for:

1. a PDF or HTML link to the right of the article title or
2. a FullText@Aber link

In addition, Google Scholar’s Citations facility specifically enables you to track citations to your own papers within the Google Scholar network. To access the Google Scholar Citation facility, login to Google Scholar with your own Google username and password at: https://scholar.google.co.uk/intl/en/scholar/citations.html and follow the instructions given. 

Please note that the Google Scholar database is not limited to coverage of peer-reviewed papers and can include magazine articles, websites, blogs and reports

Further information on full-text linking @Aber and Google Scholar.

• Search Help information
• Access
• Sign up for alerts
• Google Scholar Library
• Export

Google Alerts

https://www.google.co.uk/alerts

You can monitor the web for new content by using Google Alerts to get email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your choice of query or topic.

You can get emails when new results for a topic show up in Google Search. For example, you can get info about news, products, or mentions of your name.

Create an alert

1. Go to Google Alerts.
2. In the box at the top, enter a topic you want to follow.
3. To change your settings, click Show options. You can change:
   • How often you get notifications
   • The types of sites you’ll see
   • Your language
   • The part of the world you want info from
   • How many results you want to see
   • What accounts get the alert
4. Click Create Alert. You’ll get emails whenever we find matching search results.

Edit an alert

1. Go to Google Alerts.
2. Next to an alert, click Edit .
3. If you don’t see any options, click Show options.
4. Make your changes.
5. Click Update Alert.
6. To change how you get alerts, click Settings   check the options you want and click Save.

Delete an alert

1. Go to Google Alerts.
2. Next to the alert you want to remove, click Delete .
3. Optional: You can also delete an alert by clicking Unsubscribe at the bottom of an alert email.

User guide and seeing alerts

Step 1: Check what account you’re logged onto

Step 2: Check your alert’s settings

Step 3: Check your email settings