The advantages of receiving email alerts to new research in your area of interest are obvious:  you can receive timely, relevant content from multiple sources in one familiar place, without having to “visit” individual electronic resources. Most electronic research resources offer the option to sign up for email alerts. Commonly, you will find three types of alert:

Journal or Table of Contents (TOC) alerts

With this option you receive the table of contents of the latest issue of a journal (or journals) of your choice in your email inbox as soon as it is published online. Usually you can click on the article titles in your email and go straight to the full text (but see section 2.4  for more information about access to subscription content from email alerts).

Search or keyword alerts

This is the option to use to receive notification of new publications on a topic or by an author of your choice. Create a search in your target resource using your own keywords. When you are happy with the search, save it and opt to have it run automatically on a regular basis, with the results sent to your email inbox.

Citation alerts

This option is less common, but is provided by some ejournal publishers. You can select an article that interests you (for example, one written by you!) and request an email alert when another article is published that cites it. In some resources you can do the same thing with an author of interest.

Editor’s choice alerts

A fourth option available on some resources is to subscribe to alerts based on predefined topics chosen by the editor, rather than your own keywords.