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…