Everyone has a responsibility to keep up to date in their field or speciality and this can be mandatory for professional registration. This section suggests a range of tools for you to select an approach which best meets your needs. These include: Twitter, Journal alerts, Library current awareness, RSS feeds.
Using Twitter is an ideal way to hear about activities in your area of interest so long as you follow the approriate people. Think about relevant experts and / or organisations have a look at their profile and recent tweets - could these be useful to you? Remember you can unfollow later.
You can use tools like Hootsuite or Tweetdeck to help you manage your account.
Receiving alerts about the contents of selected journals as new issues are published is a really useful way to keep abreast of research and activities of others.
You can often sign up to alerts on journal publisher webpages.
It's possible to receive alerts for particular search queries from The Knowledge Network Library Search, so that you will receive an email whenever new research or evidence becomes available from our subscriptions.
Visit our Managing References page for full instructions on how to save searches and set up alerts.
A number of NHS Scotland libraries publish current awareness bulletins on specific topics. This involves searching recent publications and websites and collating citations and abstracts that meet a given criteria.
There is a section on The Knowledge Network displaying all the topics and you can sign up to receive issues as they are published.
Really Simple Syndication (RSS) newsfeeds are considered a bit old fashioned now but are stilll useful in some situations. These allow you to have updates from other websites highlighted in your browser or a feed reader that you have signed up to use. You can select to subscribe to feeds when you see a small orange RSS logo on websites. Google Chrome and other browsers have RSS applications you can use to view your feeds or your signup to a free service such as Feedly. The advantage of a web service is it is available from any device.
Many people in health and social care access multiple computers and mobile devices so bookmarking or using the favourites option on a browser is not ideal. There are a range of tools available to enable you to bookmark resources to read or re-use later that are synchronised across devices when you log in.
Examples include:
Visit our Current Awareness section for more information on these and other services.