Occupational Therapy

Library of the Health Sciences

Google Scholar email alerts

When you set up an email article alert, you will get an email listing new articles on your topic whenever they are published. You can set up alerts in google, most databases, and some journals. This can be a serious time-saver, and an easy way to stay up-to-date on a particular area of research.

A Google Scholar alert looks like this in your email inbox:

image of a google gmail inbox full of emails, with one coming from "Google Scholar Aler", with a portion of a search phrase visible as the subject of the message

And the body of the email alert will list the specific articles:

an email alert from Google Scholar, which shows two articles titles and an excerpt from the abstract of each, with words bolded that are in the alert's search phrase

 

To set up a Google Scholar email alert:

You must first have a gmail account, and then log into your account. Then, go to Google Scholar and do a search, then click the "create alert" text to the lower left:

a Google Scholar results page with a red arrow pointing to the "Create Alert" menu item on the lower left of the results page

You will then be given the option to be emailed up to 10 or 20 results. Then click "CREATE ALERT" to finish the process.

The next screen will be a listing of your own Google Scholar alerts. This is where you will go in future to cancel your alerts, and you can also create a new alert from this page:

a summary of 5 Google Scholar alerts, each with a different search phrase, set up within a google account, each set to show 10 or 20 results