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Research Guides

Keeping Current with Research: Home

Learn how to harness the power of RSS feeds and other alerts for research pursuits.

About This Guide

In this age of information overload, it can seem nearly impossible to stay current in areas of scholarly or personal interest.  RSS feeds and email alerts are an easy way to have specific information delivered directly to you.

What are alerts?

Alerts are personal notifications you save online for particular journal titles, database searches, or web searches.  An alert will regularly run a search for new content - saving you time and delivering content in one location.  Alerts can be created from various sources such as web pages, blogs, databases, journals, searches on the web, and citations. 

After setting up an alert, you will be notified of the new articles matching your search queries via email or RSS.

Types of Alerts

This guide is based upon collaborative work with Erica Coe, UW Tacoma Library.