10 websites to help you keep up-to-date with scholarly journal contents

1. SciFeeds
Sub-titled ‘Your Life Science Magazine Rack’, which is quite a good explanation, this site lets you view the most recent contents of just over 100 life science journals. You can browse recent issues by subject (e.g. Biochemistry, Bioinformatics, Biotechnology, etc), see the most recently updated journal Tables of Contents (TOCs), search the content of TOCs (it’s rather slow), see the most ‘popular’ articles, and if you register, you can do more. There are links to the full text of articles – access to the full text will depend on institutional or personal subscriptions.

2. ticTOCs – Journal Tables of Contents Service
ticTOCs covers all subjects – over 12,500 journal TOCs are included from more than 430 publishers. You can Search for journal titles, view the latest TOC for each journal, link to the full text of around 390,000 articles (where institutional or personal subscription allows), export TOC feeds to popular feedreaders, and select and save (by ticking them) journal titles in order to view future TOCs (You need to Register (free) to ensure your ‘MyTOCs’ are permanently saved).  Heriot-Watt University was one of the partners involved in developing this service, which was funded by JISC.

3. CiteULike Current Issues
CiteULike currently has details of over 13,000 journals. You can search or browse for journal titles, and then scan recent articles in these journals.  If you know about RSS feeds, you can get a CiteULike feed for each journal TOC.  Access to the full text will depend on institutional or personal subscriptions.

4. FeedNavigator
From the University of Helsinki, FeedNavigator downloads medical RSS feeds published by numerous websites and aggregates their content into a single feed, latest news first. This gives access to over 4,000 medical sources, including numerous many Tables of Contents, which are updated continuously.  You can also get a list of journals covered.  Access to the full text will depend on institutional or personal subscriptions.

5. MyJournals.org
Displays details of the latest articles in issues of over 570 popular science journals. You can also select from various subject areas.  Access to the full text will depend on institutional or personal subscriptions. There’s also a Twitter feed of new items.

6. Zetoc RSS
Zetoc RSS enables you to set up RSS feeds for journals included in the Zetoc service. You can find over 27,000 journal TOC RSS feeds by journal name or by words or phrases in journal titles. Zetoc includes details of more journals than the other services mentioned above.  Zetoc RSS is free to use for members of JISC-sponsored UK higher and further education institutions and research councils. It is also available to all of NHS England, Scotland and Northern Ireland. A number of other institutions are eligible to subscribe to Zetoc.

7. My Favorite Journals
You can select journals of interest from over 10,000 titles, and these are then added to ‘My Favorite Journals’, then you can select any of these favourites to view the latest Table of Contents.  Access to the full text will depend on institutional or personal subscriptions.

8. jOPML
If you know about RSS and OPML, then you can use this site to get journal Tables of Contents RSS feeds as OPML files, and then, for example, load these into your favourite feedreader.  Access to the full text will depend on institutional or personal subscriptions.

9. Ebling Library, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, have produced a list of journal feeds by topic consisting of RSS feeds for 3000+ biomedical and health sciences.  You can view the latest Table of Contents for each journal.

10. SUNCAT: Serials Union CATalogue for the UK research community includes links to TOCs, where available. The TOCs appear on the SUNCAT search result screen and at the top of the full record display.

Roddy MacLeod
Senior Subject Librarian
@libram

In-depth review of ticTOCS Journal Tables of Content service

Regular readers of this blog will know that the ICBL and the Library at Heriot-Watt were senior partners in the development of the freely available ticTOCs journal tables of contents service (the launch of the service was reported in spineless? on 10 December last year).

It was therefore very pleasing to see an in-depth review of ticTOCs by Péter Jacso in the April issue of Reference Reviews.

In a detailed and balanced review, Jasco points out not only how the ticTOCs service can benefit researchers who want to keep up-to-date with scholarly literature, but also some of the limitations of the service.

His summary is: 

ticTOCS is a splendid, state of the art version of the traditional current awareness services from RSS feeds of the Table of Contents pages of more than 14,400 scholarly journals. It takes the pain out of learning about the content of the most recent and even upcoming issues of journals. It has some lacuna in journal coverage in spite of its wide scope, and a few software shortcomings. Even in its infancy, this service helps greatly in centralizing, personalizing and filtering the flood of information. It saves a lot of time, and offers a lot of gratification to researchers free.

Roddy MacLeod
Senior Subject Librarian

Easy journal tables of contents from hundreds of publishers

Keeping up to date with what has been published in scholarly journals is vitally important for almost all researchers. Here’s a new service which can make the process much easier.

ticTOCs is a new scholarly journal tables of contents (TOCs) service. It’s free, its easy to use, and Heriot-Watt is one of the fourteen partners who’ve developed it.

ticTOCs helps you find and view the most recent table of contents of over 11,000 scholarly journals, from over 400 publishers. It’s therefore an easy way to keep up-to-date with what’s being published in journals on almost any subjects.

You can find journals of interest, view the latest TOC, link through to the full text (where our institutional subscriptions allow), and save selected journals to MyTOCs so that you can return to the site and view future TOCs (registration (free) is required if you want to permanently save your MyTOCs.

ticTOCs requires a lot less effort than setting up email alerts or an RSS reader and finding appropriate feeds, though if you already know about RSS, ticTOCs can also help you find and export journal feeds to feedreaders such as Bloglines or Google Reader.

Keep up-to-date with ticTOCs – it only takes a tick or two.  There’s also a News from ticTOCs blog.

I can thoroughly recommend this service.

Roddy MacLeod
Senior Subject Librarian