Isn’t it about time that you provided a decent current awareness service for your researchers?

Awareness of, and access to, the very latest scholarly papers published in peer-reviewed journals is really important for most researchers. I know from looking at the statistics to this blog that many people are trying to find new scholarly research papers. Every day, people land on that post after searching in Google or elsewhere for terms such as: Latest research papers; new research; new scholarly articles; where to find new research findings – and every possible combination of those and similar search words. Many more don’t make it as far as that post, where they’ll find a list of 30 free websites that can help anyone find details of new scholarly research, and even when they go through my list they’ll have to make quite an effort to understand how some of those sites work and set up alerts, and so on.

A growing number of companies, research centres and educational institutions are making it much, much easier for their researchers by setting up an effective, low-effort, low-cost, current awareness service using customisations of JournalTOCs.

Whilst the main JournalTOCs website is freely available and allows anyone to use it to find the latest research papers, behind the free service is a powerful database which can be customised by companies and research centres at minimum cost to provide the sort of personalised current awareness service that becomes highly valued by researchers.

The European University Institute, which offers one of the world’s largest doctoral and postdoctoral programmes in the social sciences, has implemented a JournalTOCs customisation, and this was recently described in the EUI Library Blog.

The Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre (VSSC) in India is another centre which has implemented a low-cost customisation. Several pharmaceutical companies, health organisations and research centres have also taken out customisations.

It takes a very short time to set up a free trial to this innovative service and there’s no commitment on your part and you won’t feel harassed with follow-up calls. JournalTOCs is confident that when you see the customisation in action, you’ll be convinced of its usefulness. I’ve described some of the features and benefits of the service in more detail in this post.

It really is about time that you take some of the burden away from your researchers, and provide them with the sort of information that they really need.

The customisations are based on JournalTOCs’ database of the latest Tables of Contents from nearly 21,000 scholarly journals from over 1,400 different publishers. Customisations allow personalisations, advances search and browse options of content from journals for which your institution has full-text access, saved articles, personalised email alerts for journals of interest, a Super-user facility to let librarians and information professionals support an institution’s researchers, and many more features.

Even if you don’t want to go as far as providing a customisation, you may still find the following of interest and use.

A YouTube presentation on JournalTOCs from Satakunta University of Applied Sciences.

A guide to JournalTOCs from Georgia State University Library.

A pdf guide to using JournalTOCs from the Frankk Curtis Library.

A guide to RSS and Alerts from AUT University, which features JournalTOCs.

Some information from the Software Sustainability Institute on JournalTOCs.

University Technology information about JournalTOCs.

Blog posts by Paul Stainthorp featuring JournalTOCs.

Information about JournalTOCs API from the ProgrammableWeb.

Cornell University Library’s guide to JournalTOCs.

Search Engine Land feature on JournalTOCs.

DIT Library blog post about JournalTOCs.