In yesterday’s installment of the Impact Challenge, you learned how to stay up-to-date in your field by following specific scholars’ work. Today, we’re going to take a complementary approach to the same thing: setting up alerts for subject areas. These alerts will send the newest research into your inbox, with very little effort on your part.

You’ll set up email alerts for Academia.edu, Google Scholar, and other scholarly networks that will keep you abreast of the newest research in your field.

Academia.edu

Logon to Academia.edu and search for a subject area in the top search bar. As you begin typing, you’ll notice suggestions populating the short-form search results:

When the subject you’re interested in appears, click on it to head to the subject page. On the subject page, click the “Follow [Subject]” button on the right-hand side of the screen:

A number of similar “Research Interests” will be suggested to you on this screen, too. (See them outlined in purple, above.) Use this list for an easy way to find other subject areas worth getting updates for, too.

Next, you’ll need to make sure you have emails enabled for these alerts. Head to Account Settings > Email Notifications. Under the “Papers” section, select “There are new top papers for the Research Interests I’m following”:

ResearchGate

ResearchGate makes it a bit more complicated: logon, go to your profile page, scroll down to find the Topics section of your profile, click “Edit” and add the subject areas you want to follow to your profile:

Then, to view new publications from the Topics you’re following, click the “Publications” tab at the top of your profile, then select “Your field of research” from the right-hand navigation panel:

You’ll now see all new publications from your Topics. To make sure you get emails when new publications are added, go to Settings > Notifications and under the Scheduled Updates section, select the “Weekly digest of activities in my topics” option:

Remember, as we mentioned in yesterday’s challenge, that ResearchGate and Academia.edu have both prompted some complaints about the volume of email they send; like other social networks (LinkedIn is a particularly noteworthy example), they are trying to get you engaged with their site as often as possible, which can result in more inbox chatter than we’d like.

However, emails targeted at your specific interests can be quite useful–we’ve talked to a lot of researchers who list this as their favorite feature of Academia. edu and ResearchGate. The nice thing is that both services make it pretty easy to disable the alerts if they become too noisy, so you can try it and see for yourself without much risk.

Google Scholar

Google Scholar’s recommends specific papers for you based on your publication history and your “Library” of saved papers by other authors. Over time, as you save more papers to your personal library and add more of your papers to your Google Scholar profile, their recommendations get more accurate.

From the Google Scholar homepage, click the My Updates link at the top:

On the “My Updates” page, you’ll see a list of recommended publications. Click “Save” beneath any citation you’d like to have added to your “My Library” to remember and read later:

Now, each time you login to Google Scholar, you’ll have a customized reading list waiting for you. Sadly, you can’t set up Google Scholar to email you a weekly reading list, but I imagine that’s not too far off.

You can set up general topical alerts, however: visit the “Alerts” link at the top of your Google Scholar homepage, click the red “Create Alert” button and type in the phrase you want Google Scholar to search for, the more specific the better (for example, set an alert for “selectins” rather than “cell biology”). Any time Google Scholar finds a new article that matches your search, it’ll send you an email alert.

You can also set up alerts for other papers cite your work (these papers will almost always be relevant to your research interests). To do that, visit your Google Scholar profile, click the “Follow” button, select “Follow new citations” and click “Create Alert.”

Mendeley

You can use Mendeley groups to stay up-to-date on publications posted to groups, which are often a peer-filtered recommendation that sometimes can find articles that you wouldn’t otherwise discover.

Login to Mendeley, select “Groups” from drop-down next to the search box in the upper-right corner, and type your research interest into the search box. A list of related groups will appear in your search results:

On the group page that’s most relevant to you, click the “Join this group” button to start receiving updates:

Now, every time you login to Mendeley, updates from your groups–including recommended papers–will appear in your newsfeed.

The final step is to set up email notifications, so you don’t have to return to Mendeley to get updates on new recommendations. Click “My Account” > “Notifications” in the upper-right corner of the screen, and under the Group Notifications section, make sure both the email and web notifications for “Someone posts an update or a comment in a group” are selected:

Zotero

Zotero works similarly to Mendeley. To search for groups in your discipline, login and select the Groups tab from the Zotero homepage. Search for a group, select a group page, and click the “Join this group” button on the group’s page.

To get notifications from Zotero when new publications are added to a group, click the Settings link in the upper-right corner, navigate to Email, then select “New post in a group discussion” and click “Update settings”:

Twitter

Twitter is another solid, real-time recommendation engine for publications, articles, and news related to your research interests. To get the best recommendations, you’ll need to follow individuals who tend to tweet about the subjects you’re interested in, and also to follow curated lists of related accounts.

To find people who are tweeting content related to your discipline, use Twitter’s advanced search to search for relevant phrases:

On the search results page, select “People” from the left-hand navigation bar and then peruse the bios where your search phrase appears. Follow any individuals that look relevant to you.

To find lists related to your search terms, click “Timelines” on the left-hand navigation bar of the advanced search screen, and relevant lists will appear in the search results:

Click on the list titles to explore, and for any that you’d like to follow, click “Subscribe” in the left-hand column:

Bonus: you can also click “List members” and “List subscribers” to find individual accounts to follow.

Now, every time you log in to Twitter, you’ll get up-to-the-minute recommendations on recent news and papers from others in your discipline.

One big drawback to Twitter is that you tend to miss anything that hasn’t been recently tweeted about, meaning you have to login fairly regularly to the service to benefit from the recommendations on an ongoing basis.

Also, unlike the other approaches we’ve discussed above, Twitter is a person-based feed, not a subject-based one…that means you may get a lot of information about what people had for lunch, along with the latest research news. While this can actually be a great way to help you build your research community, it can also be overwhelming depending on your goals.

Homework

On your preferred social networks, sign up to receive disciplinary recommendations and recent publications in your inbox for at least three topics.

Stay tuned for tomorrow’s challenge: using the mainstream media to give your work a broader audience.