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Research Guides

Life Sciences Graduate Students - Research Tips: Setting up Alerts (Ongoing Searches) in PubMed & Google Scholar

Creating a PubMed Alert

After you have created your search strategy as shown on the previous page, you can save the search and have it run automatically to capture new articles on your topic.

In this case we're looking for articles on heart regeneration. Our search strategy is:

(heart OR cardiac OR cardiomyocyte* OR myocard*) AND (regenerat* OR regrow* OR "stem cell*")

When you have your search results, click on "Create Alert" under the search box.  Follow the prompts to save the search in your MyNCBI account and set up email alerts.

screen shot with an arrow pointing to the phrase "create alert" underneath the PubMed search box

Google Scholar Alert for Tracking Publications That Cite an Important Article

The Google Scholar search engine finds articles, preprints, dissertations, and other scholarly publications that cite a given article.

When you find an article in Google Scholar, click on "Cited by" underneath the reference to see publications that have cited it.

Click on "Create Alert" on the left side of the search results to receive an alert when new publications cite this article.  You will need to create a free Google account in order to do this.