Use Alerts and BrowZine to Keep Current!

Our guest blogger today is Rene Tanner ASU librarian, who specializes in biology, life sciences and environmental resources, and will be regularly sharing tips and tricks through our TeachTech Blog. In her post below, she shares how to set up an alert, and a great app called BrowZine that may be helpful for your classes and research.

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APP:  BrowZine
Do you remember coming to the library and browsing the periodicals to see what was new in your research area? BrowZine is an app designed for browsing recent issues of scholarly journals on your iPad, iPhone or Android tablet. As the name implies, BrowZine is unlike many traditional research tools in that it emphasizes browsing over focused research and searching. Many journals develop issues around a research theme and having a tool that displays articles in the larger content of a journal issue can produce serendipitous discovers.

In BrowZine you can create a bookshelf of favorite journals, browse a collection of journals by subject, search for your favorite journal by name, view the tables of contents, and read or save articles as they are released. Saved articles can be read on- or offline.

TIP:  Email Alerts: With so much research being produced and discussed it can be difficult to keep up. Setting up alerts is a way to get the latest information automatically without actively searching for a topic.

• This guide covers email alerts for both saved searches and table of contents, RSS feeds, and more.
• Article alerts can be created for a variety of databases including PubMed, Web of Knowledge, and more.
• Many journals have an option to create table of contents alerts and JournalTOCs brings journals together so you can create an RSS feed or email alert for many of your favorite journals. 
• To monitor the Web for new research you can create an alert for Google by following this link https://www.google.com/alerts. 
  
• To create alerts for Google Scholar, do a search for the topic of interest, click “Create Alert” at the bottom of the sidebar located on the left-hand side of the results page; enter your search query, email address, and how many results you'd like to receive. Newly published papers will be periodically sent to your email address.

Comment below if you are using Google alerts, and share how you are using them!!