Journal Alerting Services

RSS Feeds

Most of the services listed below provide RSS feeds; to make use of these you will need an RSS reader, eg. Google Reader.

Introduction to RSS feeds

• The University Press Office has an explanation of RSS incuding links to alternative News Readers
• See also What is an RSS feed? from Oxford University eResources
• The BBC website provides a useful introduction to RSS

RSS feeds for journal Tables of Contents

RSS feeds allow you to bring together the latest tables of contents of your favourite journals into your own personal web page or software tool. RSS feeds are more convenient than email alerts because:

• You don't need to register separately at numerous sites
• Tables of Contents have links directly to the articles on the e-journal site
• You can look at your Tables of Contents alerts whenever you like
• Your RSS reader will indicate whenever you have unread Tables of Contents available

ZETOC Alert

is an Electronic Table of Contents alerting service

• set up a profile to send yourself an email with
  • the contents list of selected journals every time a new issue is published
  • and/or list of articles by specific authors or with specified words in title
• covers over 28,000 journals
• updated daily
• For access use your Oxford SSO (Single Sign-On) username
• covers all subjects in science, technology, medicine, engineering, business and the humanities
• ZETOC provides RSS feeds for journal articles
• the cumulative ZETOC database can be searched:
  • contains about 20 million article and conference records from 1993 to date
  • approx. 20,000 journals and 16,000 conference papers covered each year
  • can search Conferences and Journals together or separately
  • Conference Search can be useful for tracking down 'difficult to find' conference papers
  • N.B. for chemistry subject searching SciFinder (Chemical Abstracts) or Web of Science are recommended
  • search via the web interface, email or save/download results; import into EndNote OR access from within EndNote

Further information:

• Instructions on how to set up a ZETOC Alert
• ZETOC FAQ
• using with EndNote

The ZETOC service is provided by MIMAS at the University of Manchester on behalf of the British Library and JISC.

JournalTOCs

• View latest Tables of Contents on the web or set up email alerts or RSS feeds. Covers over 20,874 journals from 1568 publishers, incl. ACS, RSC, Nature.

SciFinder (Chemical Abstracts)

• Keep me Posted feature allows you to set up alerts for references or substances of interest

Web of Knowledge

• You can create Search History Alerts (eg. for subject, author or journal name searches) and Citation Alerts

Publishers' Services

If the above do not cover all the journals you need, check out the publisher's website. Many publishers provide a free alerting service to allow you to keep up-to-date with their journals by sending you an email notification whenever a new journal issue is published (this may include a Table of Contents, or give the URL of a web page where it can be found) and/or by providing RSS feeds for journal Tables of Contents. Most require registration. Publishers with a free alert or RSS service for new journal issues include:

• ACS ASAP and ToC (Table of Contents) Alerts
• Elsevier/Science Direct (can also create subject/author/cited article alerts)
• Institute of Physics
• Nature
• Oxford University Press
• RSC alerting service
• Springer
• Taylor & Francis
• Wiley
• For others, follow links to individual journal pages from Chemistry Electronic Journals available within Oxford.

For a list of publishers providing RSS feeds see RSS feeds for journal tables of contents (compiled by University of Liverpool Library).

Alternative Services

• IngentaConnect: New Journal Issue alerts
• Giga alert - keep track of the latest search results for a particular topic on the Web via automatic email alerts
• For other such services see 10 websites to help you keep up-to-date with scholarly journal contents

N.B. While the Tables of Contents are provided free, access to the full text of articles is only available if a subscription or other agreement exists.

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Updated 9/1/12. If you have any comments please contact: cheminfo@chem.ox.ac.uk