You can set up “automatic update searches” (also known as SDI – Selective Dissemination of Information) in a variety of databases relevant to your discipline. There are free services you can use to set up automatic searches of the PubMed database to be e-mailed regularly to you. Searches may be organized by subject area, by author (to track particular experts in your field), or by institution (to track the work of specific organizations). If you only want to update the searches occasionally, you can use the MyNCBI; feature of PubMed to save your strategies. Just register for a free MyNCBI and then save your strategies. When you return to the MyNCBI, you can view citations added to the database since your last search by clicking “What’s New” for a selected search. Some database producers prepare “canned” searches on topics of interest, which you can receive as e-mail updates. Another method of getting these search updates is to visit a page with links to prepared PubMed searches such as the Healthy People 2010 Information Access Project.Paid alert services include those available from Current Contents and Ingenta. There are also a number of free services

• Online access
• Receiving and reviewing journal table of contents
• Creating automated literature searches