Everyone has a responsibility to keep up-to-date in their field or speciality and this can be mandatory for professional registration.
In this section we suggest a range of tools for you to select an approach which best meets your needs. These include: Twitter, journal alerts, library current awareness, RSS feeds.
Developing and managing your personal learning networks both face to face and online ensures you are aware of, and part of important conversations about new policies, guidance, research etc. Below is a link to our video which promotes the benefits of developing your networks and some links to get you started.
Using Twitter is an ideal way to hear about activities in your area of interest so long as you follow the approriate people. Think about relevant experts and / or organisations have a look at their profile and recent tweets - could these be useful to you? Remember you can unfollow later.
You can use tools like Hootsuite or Tweetdeck to help you manage your account.
Receiving alerts about the contents of selected journals as new issues are published is a really useful way to keep abreast of research and activities of others.
You can often sign up to alerts on journal publisher webpages or you can use the Zetoc service available via The Knowledge Network.
You need your NHSScotland OpenAthens username to use Zetoc, but the advantage is you can manage your alerts in the one place. Go to Zetoc and select 'Zetoc Alert - Access' to select the journal titles. Once you have done this, you will receive an email each time a new issue is published. Hint - do not select too many titles or you will suffer from information overload! And if a title is not as useful as you expected, go to Zetoc and remove it or swap for another title.
It's possible to receive alerts for particular search queries from The Knowledge Network Library Search, so that you will receive an email whenever new research or evidence becomes available from our subscriptions.
Visit our Managing References page for full instructions on how to save searches and set up alerts.
A number of NHS Scotland libraries publish current awareness bulletins on specific topics. This involves searching recent publications and websites and collating citations and abstracts that meet a given criteria.
There is a section on The Knowledge Network displaying all the topics and you can sign up to receive issues as they are published.
Really Simple Syndication (RSS) newsfeeds are considered a bit old fashioned now but are stilll useful in some situations. These allow you to have updates from other websites highlighted in your browser or a feed reader that you have signed up to use. You can select to subscribe to feeds when you see a small orange RSS logo on websites. Google Chrome and other browsers have RSS applications you can use to view your feeds or your signup to a free service such as Feedly. The advantage of a web service is it is available from any device.
Many people in health and social care access multiple computers and mobile devices so bookmarking or using the favourites option on a browser is not ideal. There are a range of tools available to enable you to bookmark resources to read or re-use later that are synchronised across devices when you log in.
Examples include:
Visit our Current Awareness section for more information on these and other services.