Current Awareness

Current Awarness refers to a strategy for keeping yourself or an organization that you represent current in a given well-defined areas of the scientific and technical literature. There can be a number of components to a current awarness strategy one of which can be simply scanning journals of interest to you or your company. As an example, my own current awarness strategy consists of irregularly scanning journals (lately this has been approximately every two months) that I know from previous experience contain articles that may be of interest to me, e.g., American Scientist, American Journal of Physics, Physics Today, Scientific American, Science, New Scientist, and Nature.

A second more convenient, but also more expensive, component of a current awareness stragtegy is to directly subscribe to journals that are highly relevant to your interests. In my own case, because I find the information in them valuable, I also subscribe to and read the Journal of Chemical Education (monthly) and Chemical and Engineering News (weekly).  I used to subscribe to the Journal of Chemical Information and Computer Sciences (monthly), and the Chronicle of Higher Education (weekly), until I felt that they became to expensive and, in the case of the Journal of Chemical Information and Computer Sciences was easily available on-line from my desk-top.

Yet another component of a current awarness strategy is to scan the tables of contents of relevant journals for articles of interest to you. For example the Institute for Scientific Information, ISI, publishes Current Contents (the Montana Tech Library has Current Contents available on disk) which makes available the tables of contents from more than 7,000 journals and 2,000 books, and conference proceedings. The tables of contents of many journals or collections of journals are also now available on-line, e.g., the American Chemical Society publishes a number of journals of interest to chemists, whose tables of contents can be browsed and searched electronically from the Societies' home page.   Montana Tech has now subscribed to an electronic database that provides complete full-text searchable access to articles published by the American Chemical Society.

The most powerful current awareness strategies consist of developing fine-tuned profiles or queries of electronic databases or collections of databases that scan the abstracts of many journals, perhaps spanning a number of databases, returning only articles in which you are interested, and which automatically scan the updates of these databases. For example, I have an interest in the applications of graph theory in chemistry and at one time developed a query in Chemical Abstracts, which searched for the phrases, graph theory or chemi... graph...:

GRAPH(W)THEORY OR CHEMI?(W)GRAPH#
What role(s) does(do) the operator (W), and the truncation characters, ? and #, play in this query? As a measure of the effectiveness of this approach, this query returned 1,343 references and cost ~$2.00.

Ingenta, formerly The Colorado Association of Research Libraries, CARL Uncover, is a database of ~8,800,000 articles published in ~18,000 journals since 1988. Ingenta is available free on the WEB and supports search profiles that can be saved and automatically activated with the results delivered to you via e-mail (for a small annual fee - it was $25 in 1999). A recent search on the terms chemical and graph uncovered 122 articles.

PubSCIENCE, was another free on-line database that providesd access to peer reviewed scientific and technical journal literature with a focus on the physical sciences and related disciplines. In collaboration with peer reviewed journal publishers, PubSCIENCE enablee users to search across bibliographic citations from multiple journal sources, to identify information of interest, and, based upon negotiated agreements with the individual publishers, to access and view full text journal articles. This product which was jointly sponsored by the Department of Energy and the Government Printing Office is slated to be discontinued in either late 2002 or 2003. A recent search on the terms chemical and graph IN PubSCIENCE uncovered 122 articles.

Current Awareness Assignment:

You have been asked by your supervisor (you are a new employee and are too young to be boss yet) to develop a current awareness strategy that your company can use to keep up with the technical literature in an area of interest to you. She would like a clearly written summary of this strategy that is at least one page in length a week from now. This summary should include a clear and concise description of the technical area or subject targeted by this strategy. The summary should note the full titles of at least two journals currently carried by the Montana Tech Library that would be scanned for articles pertaining to the subject of interest. The full titles of a least three other journals not carried by the Montana Tech Library, whose tables of contents are available electronically and which would also be scanned, should be listed along with how these journals are electronically accessed. Finally at least three databases should be listed that would be examined for articles of interest to this current awareness stategy. In each case the frequency with which these journals and databases would be consulted should be noted (this will vary with the source and will usually be same as the frequency of publication a journal or the update of a database). Your supervisor will evaluate this summary based on how relevant the sources are to the area of interest that you have described. Of course you should keep in mind that she has a reputation for being becoming very aggravated by reports that contain grammatical and spelling errors.