EBSCO Alerts: Keeping Up with Scholarly Literature

Part One:

Creating a MyEBSCOhost Account

Setting Up Search Alerts

Dr. David Hamrick, Reference/Cataloging Librarian

Zale Library at Paul Quinn College

What you’ll learn

Part One: How to create a MyEBSCOhost account How to create a “search alert” that will e-mail you

when new results turn up to a specified search Part Two:

How to create a “journal alert” that will e-mail a summary of the latest articles in selected journals

How to manage, delete, or modify your alerts

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First, enter Texshare from the Library web page and select Ebsco MasterFile and Academic Search.

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Be sure to select Academic Search Complete, for the best coverage of scholarly journals…

Click “Continue” to move on.

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Click on “Sign in to My EBSCOhost” to create an account.

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EBSCOhost will now ask you to sign in to “My EBSCOhost”. If you don’t have an account with them, click here…

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You’ll be asked for your name, an e-mail address, and a password you would like to use for this account.

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Make up your own user name and password; they do not need to be the same as your PQC or Texshare login.

Suppose I want to keep up with the news about my old dissertation topic, the 16th-century composer Gallus Dressler.

gallus AND dressler

(This is an easy search, since both his first and last names are unusual.)

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If you use RSS feeds, you already know what this does, and you can add this search as a feed to your favorite reader.

Otherwise, click here to create an “alert” for this search.

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After you’re signed in, you’ll see a screen like this. This allows me to save the search I did as an “alert”…

This means that EBSCOhost will run this search automatically and alert me whenever something new turns up.

gallus AND dressler

I just need to give the search a name, and save it as an Alert.

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Once you click the “Save Search as Alert”, you’ll need to scroll down to set up your preferences for this search alert.

For example, you can set how often you want to get updates…

You can also set the length of time you want to keep getting updates.

Most importantly, you need to enter the e-mail address where you want to receive your alerts.

dhamrick@pqc.edu

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You’ll probably want to add a subject line, so you’ll recognize the alert e-mails when they arrive.

Gallus Dressler - Ebsco alert

Then click “save”, and EBSCO will start monitoring the search for you!

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Summary

So far, we’ve seen how to create “My EBSCOhost” account, and how to save a search alert.

EBSCO will review you search alerts every day (unless you change the frequency), and e-mail you with any updates.

This is a great way to keep up with an ongoing research interest that you don’t necessarily work on every day.