Library guides: Digital and social media tools: Keeping up to date

Keeping up to date

It may be useful to use tools to keep up to date with new research, current affairs and read blogs and tweets written by academics, researchers and practitioners in your chosen field of interest. Examples of tools include:

BrowZine

BrowZine is an online journal browser and current awareness tool, which provides direct access to the majority of the Library’s current journals across the disciplines. BrowZine offers a simple way to keep up to date with browsing and reading current and recent journal articles.

Browzine is also in a format optimized for tablet devices. You can create a personal bookshelf of favourite journals, be alerted when new editions of journals are published and easily save references to RefWorks and other services.

Once installed, the first time you open the app you can choose your library from a drop down list. Select “City, University of London” then enter your City username and password into the login screen.

Download BrowZine and choose the appropriate link for your Android or iOS mobile device.

Current newspaper collections

These databases are updated daily and can be used to search UK and international news from the 1980s onwards.

When searching Nexis UK and Factiva you can access the full text of those newspapers which are normally restricted by paywalls, such as The Times (London) and the New York Times.

Nexis UK
Full-text coverage of national, regional and international news from a range of sources including newswires. Updated daily and with many titles having a 20 year archive, useful for current affairs and seeing how topics have been reported.
Articles generally have no formatting or images.
Limitation
- Users may print and download for personal use only single copies of up to ten documents in Full Text Format from the results of one search.
- Users are prohibited from downloading substantial parts of the database and materials cannot be stored for longer than 90 days.
- Nexis cannot be used for any non-academic purposes and text data mining is not permitted.
- The right to retrieve and store machine-readable copies of Materials is limited to the retrieval of a single copy of a reasonable portion of the Materials included in any individual file of the Online Services using the downloading commands of the Online Services or your web browser software and storage of that copy in machine readable form for no more than 90 days, primarily for one person’s exclusive use, to the extent the storage of those Materials is not further limited or prohibited by the Additional Terms.
- For further information please see Library Services’ Online Resource Policy.
Factiva
Offers full text from a range of sources including international newspapers, trade publications and magazines. Many titles have a 20 year archive and content is updated daily, making it useful for business, industry news and reports.
Please note that articles generally have no formatting or images.
Limitation
- The length of time to store a single copy of downloaded materials from this resource in machine readable form is limited to 30 days only.
- Text data mining is not permitted within our Factiva UK licence.
PressReader
Provides digital access to thousands of newspapers and magazines from around the world. You can browse entire editions making it useful for studying page layout etc.
PressReader provides access to the last year of most publications. App available: Setting up the PressReader App

Twitter

Twitter is useful to keep up to date with:

News and current affairs and research.
Different Twitter accounts from researchers and academics.
Obtaining feedback on your research ideas.
Following conference and event hashtags such as #vitae, #lilac22.

Research blogs

Blogs are useful to express your own opinions and to promote your research. You may wish to have your own blog - see our information on City blogs. They are also useful for current awareness and to find out what other researchers in your field are working on.

You can find some blogs of interest by searching Google and adding the term blogs to your search.

You can follow researchers' blogs and see their new postings and some blogs are interactive and allow comments and discussion. Useful research blogs include: The Thesis Whisperer and PhD life.

Your University or institution might have its own blog platform which you could use or there are many free ones available such as WordPress and Blogger.

Mendeley and Zotero communities

Mendeley and Zotero are free bibliographic management tools which you can use to create a library of references of articles, book chapters, books, reports and conference papers.

These sites also encourage sharing and collaboration and you can do this by joining various Special Interest Groups.