Carrying out research can be a daunting task. Managing all of the information you find and keeping up with new research as it comes out can sometimes take more time than doing the research itself.
The modules in this page will help you to manage your information better by:
showing you how to use citation management software such as EndNote or Zotero.
demonstrating the use of social bookmarking and wikis as another way to manage your information individually or with a group.
You can also learn how to keep up with information by:
using research alerts (journal table of contents and/or database search alerts)
Librarians regularly offer workshops on these topics as well. Check here to see when these workshops are being offered.
What Are RSS Feeds?
RSS (Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication) is a format for delivering regularly changing web content. Many news-related sites, weblogs and other online publishers, like article databases and journal publishers, syndicate their content as an RSS Feed to whomever wants it.
How Do I Use RSS Feeds?
To use RSS feeds, you will need a piece of software known as an RSS reader or aggregator. The reader automatically gathers RSS feeds from all of your selected online publications, and makes them available to you in one place, either on a website or in your email.
As new issues of journals or individual news articles are published, the RSS reader will automatically download details via RSS and will alert you that a new issue is available online.
It depends on your RSS reader, but here is a general procedure.
Click on the icon of the RSS feed that interests you. Icons may look like or
Copy the URL of the page that opens.
Open up your newsreader software and paste that URL into the appropriate place. Using Bloglines software as an example, click "add" and a window will open. Paste the RSS URL into the box. Click "subscribe." Choose your options and then click "subscribe" again.
The new feed will appear under "My Feeds"
Click on any headline, and the story will appear in your Bloglines webpage
Publisher Alerts and Feeds
Alerts and feeds are also available for individual journals or groups of journals through publishers or associations.
How to Get a News Reader Tutorial
How to Add an RSS Feed Tutorial
Time to move away from Ingenta
Ingenta Users: Beginning August 2009, OSU will no longer provide access to the Ingenta Current Awareness Service. For help "read more" below.
If you have been using Ingenta for your research alerts you will need to migrate to a different service by August 2009, we suggest the following options:
For your subject search alerts, take advantage of recommendations noted under Search Alerts from Database Providers;
For your ingenta Table of Contents updates, use the ticTOCs service noted below;
If you only want to receive the table of contents from five or fewer journals, after August 1, you may want to sign up for Ingenta's [limited] free services. To do this, begin go to the Ingenta Connect website.
Research alerts are services provided by databases or journals that allow you to be notified either by email or through your RSS Feedreader when new information is published. There are two main types of alert systems -- General Search Alerts and Table of Contents Alerts.
General Search Alerts let you know when an article is published that contains the keywords, author, or subject you specified.
Table of Contents Alerts let you know when a new issue of a journal has been published. As the name implies, the table of contents of that journal are sent to you.
Alerts will help you to keep track of important journals articles without needing to remember to run the search yourself or go to the journal website (or the library receiving the journal in print).
ticTOCs - New Table of Contents Alerting Service
An alternative to Ingenta is the ticTOCs table of contents alerting service.
You can search for journals from which you would like to receive table of contents, and incorporate those feeds into an RSS feed reader including the RSS feeds folder in Microsoft Outlook;
ticTOCs is not connected to the OSU Libraries' catalog or ejournal list;
In order to find the full-text of an article of interest go to the E-Journal list and use the "Citation Linker."
ticTOCs Tutorials
The ticTOCS service is quite straight forward to use if you wish to experiment on your own. However, if you would like a preview to get started, view the following tutorials:
Academic Search Premier Agricola Alt Healthwatch Business Source Premier CINAHL Clinical Pharmacology Computer Source EBSCO Animals Education Research Complete ERIC Fuente Academia Funk and Wagnalls New World Encyclopedia GeoRef Health Source Inspec Legal Collection MAS Ultra - School Edition MasterFILE Premier MedicLatina Medline Middle Search Plus Military and Government Collection MLA Directory of Periodicals MLA International Bibliography Newspaper Source Pre-CINAHL Primary Search Professional Development Collection Psychology and Behavioral Sciences College Regional Business News Religion and Philosophy Collection TOPICsearch Vocational and Career Collection
Ageline Biosis Food Science and Technology Abstracts Philosophers Index SPORTDiscus
Project Muse
Table of Contents service by journal or subject delivered via e-mail. 250 journal titles are included. Set up an alert Set up a feed
Publisher Alerts and Feeds
Alerts and feeds are also available for individual journals or groups of journals through publishers or associations.
How Can I Manage My Citations?
Bibliographic management software packages help researchers collect and manage citation information about papers, books, web sites, and images. As you collect more citations and papers, it will gradually become harder to keep up and keep track of them. Bibliographic software makes it easy for you to:
Keep all your citations in one place
Search the papers you collect by author, title, journal, subject headings or your own keywords
Automatically generate bibliographies or works cited lists in particular style formats
Insert footnotes or endnotes directly into your documents, depending on the software package you have.
Which Software to Choose?
There are a number of choices, but the main commercial software packages are EndNote, ProCite, Reference Manager, and RefWorks. There are also some free choices that might work for you, such as Zotero or EndNoteWeb (free only to current OSU students and faculty). Check either of this Web site for a comparison of the major software options.
As you are exploring the web pages and specifications of the software packages, consider these questions:
What bibliographic software do colleagues in your field use?
Do you use a Mac or a PC? Some packages are not available for Macs.
Do you usually use the same computer, or do you use many different computers to do your research writing? Some packages are web-based (Refworks, Biblioscape, Zotero and EndNoteWeb) which easily facilitates the use of multiple computers.
What kind of software support is available? OSU Libraries has an online EndNote tutorial, as well as instruction and classes offered at OSU Libraries for EndNote, Zotero and EndNoteWeb (call 541-737-9902 to find out when the next class is), but OSU does not offer any other software support.
EndNoteWeb free access is available if you "register for more features" through OSU Libraries subscription to Web of Science. This service is available to you only as long as you are a student, staff or faculty of OSU, whereas if you buy the software, you take it with you.
Social bookmarking web sites allow you to save your personal bookmarks to a public site and assign keywords, or "tags", to them. Because your bookmarks are on a public web site, you can easily share them with others. This can be very useful for group research projects. Because your bookmarks are tagged, you can easily search your bookmarks by keywords that are meaningful to you. Social bookmarking sites also aggregate tags, showing how many people are using popular tags; this makes it easy to discover new websites by looking at what other people are tagging.
A blog (web log) is a website where journal entries are kept in reverse chronological order. Blogs usually focus on a specific topic and are frequently updated. Most blogs have one author referred to as a "blogger", but there are also group authored blogs. While many blogs are personal in nature, others are news and research related.
What is a Wiki?
A wiki is a collaborative live document. Essentially it is a collection of webpages that can be edited, manipulated, and commented upon without working through a web editor and transferring files to a web server. There is a communal philosophy of allowing all users to maintain the content contained on the wiki pages.
How Do I Find a Blog?
There are many news, academic, and research blogs. You might begin your search by looking at some of these sites:
Below is a sampling of our own wikis, popular wikis, and a few wiki search engines:
Wikipedia: arguably the most popular wiki in the world, a virtual encyclopedia structured as a wiki
OSU Wiki: this wiki exists to share ideas about OSU and its environment; everyone with an ONID (Oregon State University Network ID) is welcome to post notes and ideas.
OSU Libraries Wiki: a collection of wikis developed within OSU libraries
Wikitravel: a project to create a reliable and up-to-date world travel guide
wikiHow: a collaborative project with the goal of building the world's largest how-to manual
How Do I Keep Track of Blog Feeds?
If you are following more than one blog, it can be very time consuming to check each blog daily. To learn how to be notified of all updates in one location, read about how to get a newsreader on the RSS tab.
How Can I Use Wikis?
There are quite a few sites that allow you to create your own wiki for free. Here are some to start with:
or 