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Creating alerts: Home

Creating alerts to stay up to date in your discipline

Alerts assistance

Contact your Faculty Librarian for assistance. For other databases not listed visit the help option of a database

How to set up alerts from a few selected databases

EBSCOhost

Google Scholar

ProQuest databases

ScienceDirect

SCOPUS

Web of Science

SABINET African Journals
Create an alert from the bell icon on the right-hand side of the page.
If you are not signed into a profile, you will be prompted to either sign-in or register
An alert will be created. Alternatively, you can go to My Profile directly and access the option to setup your alerts.
Alerts can be managed from "My profile"

Alerts: keeping up-do-date with scientific literature

  • helps you to stay up to date in your discipline without repeating searches
  • pushes the latest relevant information to you in the form of an e-mail with hyperlinks
  • saves you time with literature searches

Alert types:

  • Search alerts notify you each time a saved search renders new results
  • Author citation alerts notify you when a document by one of your selected authors is cited
  • Document (article) citation alerts notify you when one of your selected document is cited
  • Journal alerts notify you when a new issue of your favourite journal becomes available


Select a database to create a topic search or a citation alert. Library databases cover a comprehensive list of journals while publisher alerts are limited to a significantly fewer number of journals.

Create journal table of content alerts on publishers' sites. Publishers publishes new journal issues before it is indexed in a database.

What is the difference between e-mail alerts and RSS (Rich Site Summary) feeds?

Most web sites offer two options to stay up to date in your discipline: receiving updates via e-mail alerts and via RSS feeds.
  • E-mail alerts are sent to your e-mail box. You can specify how often you wish to receive them i.e. immediately, daily, weekly, etc.