Medical Literature

Keeping on top of the literature: Google Scholar Alerts

Following up on our post about setting up PubMed Alerts, a secondary source for FREE literature alerts is Google Scholar. You may wonder, if you’ve already set up alerts in PubMed, why should you bother to set up literature alerts in Google Scholar? Good question. After all, PubMed, which is offered by the US National Library of Medicine, is a premier (free) source for biomedical literature. It covers over 5200 scholarly journals, and includes the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) index, to which your keyword terms are conveniently mapped to increase your list of relevant results. It’s definitely your best starting point, especially if you don’t have access to premium medical literature databases, such as Embase or Scopus.

But Google Scholar, a multi-disciplinary search engine (as opposed to a database), can sometimes supplement your findings from PubMed…

Keeping on top of the literature: PubMed Alerts

There are many reasons it’s important to keep abreast of the medical literature: you need to keep on top of developments in your therapy areas, you’re doing due diligence ahead of a potential deal in a new disease area or technology, or you just need to know what your competitors are up to.

Over the next several weeks, I’ll be posting tips about setting up search alerts in PubMed, Google Scholar, and also table of contents alerts from your favorite journals. This way, important literature is pushed right to your inbox so you won’t miss anything…