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School Psychology

Creating an Alert - Tracking New Articles and Books in Your Field

Search alerts are a time saver! You do not need to perform the same search again and again to determine if any new articles have been published on your topic. Instead, articles matching your search parameters will be sent to you.

Search alerts are useful for:

  •         long-term research projects or dissertations
  •         monitoring the literature in a field
  •         keeping up with key researchers/ authors

Most databases such as PsycInfo, etc., provide a feature that can automatically keep you up-to-date on new publications in your research area. Some journal publishers may also offer an alerting feature that covers all the publications on their platform. Once you have created an alert, every time the database is updated with new material, you'll receive an email with the citations for all the new items that match your topic. You will have to register for a personal account with the database (free) in order to take advantage of any alerting features. 

The first step in creating a search alert is to create a search that returns results similar to what you'd like to receive alerts for.

On the page that displays your results list, most databases provide a link to create an alert.

To create an alert in ProQuest (includes databases such as PsycINFO, ABI Inform Global, and ProQuest Central)