What Graduate Students Need to Know

• Ask your professors what journals they read
• In the classes you take, you will often read articles from the top journals
• You can also identify them by looking at bibliographies of the articles you're reading

What is an alert?

An alert is notification of new research published in your field. 

Table of Contents (TOC) Alerting: 

• Just create an alert at the website of your favorite journal! 

• Just keep in mind that access to the full-text depends on how GW Libraries subscribes to the journal.

• Or get it all in one from a free online service that covers 20,000 journals:  http://www.journaltocs.ac.uk/

Saved Search/Keyword Alerts:

• Article databases will often let you set up email alerts when articles matching your search criteria are published.

• Develop a keyword search in your favorite database and the latest articles matching your keywords will be sent automatically to you. 

• A great tip if you've finished Chapter 2 of your dissertation!

• You can even set this up in Google Scholar by running a search and then clicking on the envelope on the left that says “Create Alert”.

Citation Alert:

Get an alert when your favorite article or author has been cited. And this is good way to see if your research is being cited too!

• Do a search for your author or citation

• Click on “Cited By” then click the envelope on the left that says “Create Alert” 

• WoS is more exclusive only looks at a select 6000 journals and their bibliographies.

• Do a "Cited Reference Search" and you can set up a saved search in the database