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Maintaining Current Awareness with Journals

By H Dominic W Stiles, on 7 October 2016

By Ed Lyon

UCL subscribes to 50,000 electronic journals, and a wide range of journals received only in print format.  There are dozens of journals which publish in the fields of audiology and otorhinolaryngology – it can be very difficult to monitor these journals for developments and maintain one’s current awareness: but it need not be.  There are several tools which can help you keep up to date.

At the most basic levels are things like Google Scholar alerts, requiring a Google account which is easy to set up.  These however bring you rather variable results.  You can put in terms you’re interested in, such as “cochlear implant”, and make more complex searches, e.g. “cochlear implant” and author:waltzmann.  This type of search is better than nothing but, depending on the terms used, may return a great deal of dross for every result of interest.

More useful material can be achieved through running regular searches through Medline.  To do this you need to create an account, design and input your search and adjust the update settings. This is not as onerous a task as it sounds, but Medline uses medical subject headings – MeSH – which can be confusing when you first encounter them. Please call in or contact us and we will talk you through the steps.

Most journal websites allow you to set up alerts to receive electronic tables of contents.  This can be a useful way of keeping up to date, but does rely on your seeing and acting on the emails.  If you receive a lot of emails these may be missed.

However, UCL has a subscription to Browzine, which can be accessed through the Library website.  Go to http://metalib.ucl.ac.uk/V/?func=find-db-1-title&mode=titles&scan_start=b&search_type=start&restricted=all and scroll down; you will need your UCL username and password if using it offsite.UCL jnls 1

This search for ‘audiology’ has turned up a number of journals, e.g. ‘Audiology and Neuro-Otology’: and two subjects, audiology and rehabilitative audiology. These expand to reveal a further range of journals:UCL jnls 2

You can add journals to a virtual bookshelf after creating an account, and then return to Browzine.  You can see a video about it here:

 

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