With the increasing volume and velocity of scholarly content being published digitally and made available to researchers (and also students), searching for a specific piece of scholarly information to answer a research question can feel like trying to find one single pearl in a vast ocean of pearls – impossible! Researchers, students, and lifelong learners often spend hours at a time manually searching for the latest academic studies published to help determine whether or not a study fits their needs.
There is a very real fear that they will miss out on an important study when their traditional method of formal, periodic, proactive searching cannot keep pace with the volume of new, incoming studies available for review and analysis. Traditional methods of proactive searching for scholarly articles, such as those described above, have become entirely obsolete due to the massive volume of new scholarly material being published every day and the fact that researchers and others no longer prefer to search in a reactive manner. Instead, researchers are much better off using the tools available on the internet, which provide them with ongoing, updated, and timely information continuously and automatically via an ongoing supply of original and published scholarly articles related to their specific research interests. Google Scholar Alerts is the best example of a tool currently available for use by researchers to provide continuously updated information in the form of scholarly articles being published that fit their specific needs. Google Scholar Alerts is a free tool that does not require any fee to use, nor does it require any registration or sign up.
Consider the idea of one-time setting up a scholarly search, and the top tier of your field then being sent directly to your inbox. This is at the very heart of what Google Scholar Alerts does for you. Everything begins with a well constructed search of Google Scholar. This is far more than simply typing a few terms into the search box, it is in fact an art. You can utilize advanced search features like putting ” “, around phrases you want the words to be in the exact order you have them, using the author: prefix to search the output from specific authors, and intitle: to search for papers with specific words in their title. The results of this first search will form the basis of your academic alert search, and when you press the envelope icon (see below the search box) you will create a seed for your search. By doing this you are instructing Google Scholar to passively monitor your search interests, and beginning immediately you will have ended your passive waiting game. Your academic paper search is no longer something you do, it’s something that works for you, tirelessly scanning the millions of new articles, preprints, and theses added to the index.
A major advantage of this system is its simple structure paired with considerable customisation. You won’t be receiving a generic, broad-coverage newsletter. You’ll create your own research radar. A doctoral student monitoring a methodological niche may set up a long chain of terms for alerts (most likely, none of which would show up in a generic feed). A professor wanting to know who is citing their work may set up an alert with “cited by: [the link to their article]” to directly see how the conversation about their work is being brought forward and to see how much the citation of their work has changed. This takes the academic search process from a task to a customised service. Every e-mail alert will be a summary of all recently added content that fits your custom criteria, with links, citations, and excerpts from each. It’s like having an all-day, every-day personal scholar who is working on your individual scholarly paper requests and offering the results back to you during a regular time frame that you set up for them to provide for you – daily, weekly, or as a new set of results are produced for you.
With this proactive solution, the researcher’s experience with knowledge has been transformed from an experience of anxiety of possibly missing something to one of confidence that their scholarly field will be watched for them. When revolutionary articles are published or new studies are developed to dispute past paradigms, you will receive notification of these items as they happen. With the immediate availability of newly published scholarly information, this accelerates the knowledge cycle. As a result, there will be faster literature reviews, quicker incorporation of new findings into ongoing research, and much more timely responses to scholarly discourse. The efficiency gains are astounding. Hours that might have been utilized for repetitive manual searches for scholarly articles will be recuperated. This regained cognitive capacity can now be applied to higher levels of analysis, critical thought, and writing. The alerts provide surveillance, which allows the researcher to be able to devote their thought to synthesis and creation.
Nevertheless, being able to use this powerful search engine for academic papers successfully will require a plan and occasional change. The first search that you make will be important. If it is too broad, you will have many irrelevant results in your inbox from your search; as this continues, you will develop search alert fatigue and will eventually stop checking for updates. If it is too narrow, you may not see a lot of results or may miss many results that come from serendipitously discovering new connections of disciplines that often will spur innovation. The best approach is to start off with a focused base of information that your actual main search is for and then have multiple alerts for things that relate to the subject of that main search. It is also important to periodically look at your alerts and adjust them. Your research will change as time passes, and your alerts will need to also change based upon the changing state of your research. Some words may be so common that it no longer provides you with good results, or you have found a better keyword in the literature that you are now able to use with a traditional keyword search. Part of managing your digital research identity is an ongoing process, managing your alerts.
Google Scholar Alerts is about much more than just convenience; they’re designed to help create a scholarly community that is more cohesive and responsive. They help demonstrate the impact of your research through the creation of a real-world, real-time map of how your work has been referenced and utilized. By providing you with real-time notifications when your work has been cited, you can visualize how your ideas have traveled and been utilized by scholars around the globe and how they are being challenged and extended in the scholarly world. Google Scholar Alerts turn what was once a static, bibliographical record of your research into a real-time notification of the impact of your work from an intellectual standpoint. Google Scholar Alerts are also an invaluable tool for researching new fields of study or rapidly developing areas of study—such as climate science or AI ethics—because they provide an almost instantaneous understanding of what’s happening in the area of research you’re interested in. The search for academic literature using Google Scholar Alerts helps you to use an academic lens to visualize the outer edge of discovery—where knowledge is being created and developed. This capability is extremely useful when you’re preparing grant proposals, developing state-of-the art literature reviews, or staying up-to-date on current research in a rapidly evolving field.
It is critical to keep in mind also that this is only one resource in an overall resource “ecosystem.” While Google Scholar has a great number of available papers, its coverage is highly impacted by availability limits. Therefore, a full search should involve using bibliographic databases that are unique to particular disciplines such as PubMed, IEEE Xplore, JSTOR, etc. Scholar Alerts serve as a broad-based, overarching monitoring system but may be most useful when used with other resources. Scholar Alerts are like a wide-angle radar that can detect a lot of activity happening at a distance but cause you to reference more detailed sources for a second look when it is necessary to do so. Using a layered approach allows you to gather both a great amount of information and compare that amount to other sources to ensure accuracy and completeness.
By using Google Scholar Alerts to improve your academic research, you are taking a more pro-active approach to being an academic. You will no longer be just an occasional visitor to the ‘library of knowledge.’ Rather, you will become a permanent part of it. With modern search capabilities set up through the use of these intelligent, persistent queries, you will have a continuous supply of the newest and most appropriate knowledge to feed your research. You will convert the large amount of information available into a manageable, directed stream that keeps your interest alive and helps you to keep moving forward in your work as you pursue knowledge. If you look at it, it is about as close as you can come to having the entire academic community provide you with the latest information on the diverse topics being studied in your field.