There are a number of alerting services available which send you details of newly-published journal articles in your area of study or research.

Zetoc is the British Library’s alerting service providing access to around 20,000 current journals and approximately 16,000 conference proceedings published every year, from 1993-. Using your York single sign-on you can set up an account and start receiving alerts to your email account or RSS reader.

JournalTOCs (which replaced TicTOCs in April 2012) is a freely-available online collection of scholarly journal Tables of Content, with over 19,000 journals from over 1000 publishers. There is a dedicated section for Education journals.To use this free service, select a list of journals of interest and you will be alerted to the contents of new issues as they are published.

Using MIMAS Web of Science, you can set up an e-mail alert when articles you select are cited. You can also use this feature to keep a list of your favourite articles. Look at the library’s keeping-up-to-date guide for details.

Many bibliographic databases allow you to keep up-to-date with new content by setting up RSS feed or creating automatic alerts so that you receive notice when new content in your research area is added.

Procedures for setting these up vary in different databases but in general, after you have run your search, look out for boxes such as “Create Alert”. Click here for some online training videos from ProQuest about creating alerts.

Database help pages will give you more information, or speak to your Faculty Librarian for guidance on specific resources.

Most eJournal publishers make journal articles available online in advance of their actual publication date. If you find a particularly relevant journal you may be able to sign up to an RSS feed to be informed when new research for it has been accepted and made available online.

Remember to look out for conferences in your research field.

You may also find some journal pre-prints in the White Rose Research Online repository.

Mailing lists can be an excellent way of sharing ideas and information with others working in your research area, as well as finding out about relevant conferences and other events.

JISCMail hosts a large number of academic groups specifically related to education. You will need to sign up to the site and to individual groups.

There are a number of education-specific blogs, as well as Twitter groups, which may be helpful to join if you are researching a particular field of education. To find relevant blogs, start by using a dedicated search engine like Google blog search.

The library subscribes to a range of newspapers in both print and electronic format. Many newspapers, such as the The Guardian, also provide a lot of free content online via their webpages so it is worth getting in the habit of bookmarking these sites and then checking them regularly.

To access past newspapers, go the Nexis UK database: