JOURNAL TABLE OF CONTENTS ALERTS
A journal table of contents alert sends you the table of contents of a particular journal (usually by email, sometimes available by RSS) when a new journal issue is published. 

SEARCH ALERTS
Search alerts notify you when new articles are available matching a pre-defined search. When setting up a search alert, you can choose how often you would like to receive an alert and how you would like to receive it (either through email or through an RSS feed). 

DATABASES PROVIDING ALERTING SERVICES
ProQuest, Project Muse, EBSCOhost, ScienceDirect, PubMed and CQ Researcher are some of the databases or database vendors that provide alerting services.

RSS ("Really Simply Syndication" or "Rich Site Summary")
RSS feeds  deliver online content to a feed reader as an XML file. You can subscribe to RSS feeds with a web-based "feed reader" such as Google Reader or Bloglines; there are also a variety of other free feed readers that may be downloaded to your PC, rather than accessed through a specific web account.

SETTING UP SEARCH ALERTS -- SPECIFICS
In many of our eReources, a link is sometimes provided to offer journal alerts, automated searches or some other subscription service.

Currently, if you are working from off campus your RSS search alert or RSS search feed will be completely functional for reading titles and abstracts. However, when you click on a title to access the full text of an article, you should be prompted for your Sentry username and password in order to access the full article.  

Here is an example of the format of an RSS alert:

http://rss.ebscohost.com/AlertSyndicationService/Syndication.asmx/GetFeed?guid=12345

If you have other questions about alerting services, let us know.