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Strategy-as-Practice: Keeping up to date with your research in your subject field

Provides relevant information and training help for Unisa Business Management postgraduate students

Keeping up to date with publications in your field of research

Doing a literature search involves two steps. The first step is to do a comprehensive search on a specific database to find all the literature relevant to your research topic. The second step is to create an alert based on the search that you did. This will ensure that the database sends you an e-mail when new literature, based on your search, is published. This will eliminate the need to re-do searches regularly to see if something new was published.

There are three types of alerts available, but their availability depends on the functionality of the database that you are using.

  • Table of Contents (TOC) Alerts -- Receive the table of contents of the most recent issue of a specific journal(s). It is one of the best ways of keeping up to date with the latest articles, current research, and publishing trends in your field.
  • Search Alerts -- Search alerts are set up to provide automatic e-mail notification whenever new search results become available in a database (author's publication, keywords, or other search criteria). You will be able to connect to the citation, download the citation, and full text (when available) from the alert
  • Citation Alerts -- Be notified when someone cites a specific article

Make use of this guide to set up your own customized alerts.

Alerting: Manuals and Help

Various databases offer this very useful service to assist the researcher to keep up to date. In most cases you will be required to register on the database to be able to make use of this feature free of charge. Refer to the list below for information/help on how to use the alerting services available: