Current awareness sources

Research workers need to keep up-to-date with progress in their own disciplines and within related areas. This can be carried out in a number of ways:

• The traditional method is to regularly scan a small number of highly relevant journals which are judged to be of central importance within your subject field. This method is relatively time-consuming and, if used alone, involves the time-delay between the actual research and publication in journal article form.
• A more modern method is to make use of online Current Awareness databases that are frequently available via the campus network or via the Internet. These databases contain Tables of Contents of journals (TOCs) and other publications. They are usually updated at least once a week. Examples are BIDS, Ingenta.

  Other useful sources for details of journals and Tables of Contents are:

  • The Scout Report for Science & Engineering - Current Awareness Metapage from the Scout Project located in the Department of Computer Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison
  • Scholarly Journals - from University of Houston
• There are also possibilities to access, free of charge, to lists of journal titles and, sometimes, Tables of Contents of the journals which, by subscription, are accessible in full text via the Internet. Some examples are:
  • EBSCOhost from EBSCO
  • Elsevier
  • LINK Alert - Springer-Verlag
  • Project Muse from the Johns Hopkins University and the Milton's Eisenhower Library
  • SwetsWise from Swets & Zeitlinger
• Current awareness searching of journals can also be handled by means of special publications which contain the Tables of Contents of a large number of discipline-oriented journals.

  Current Contents, published weekly and available at KTU library:

  • Engineering, Computing & Technology (over 1030 journals)

  displays the tables of contents from the world's most influential scholarly journals and provides bibliographic data for journal articles, reviews, editorials, corrections, and conference proceedings. Besides the recent web access, Current Contents are available in print, on disk or via the Data-Star, DIALOG, DIMDI or OVID Technologies information systems.

• Another useful source of up-to-date information is patents.

Back to Primary and Secondary Information Sources