Our resource of the month in July was a collection of tools, tips, and other forms of support to help with keeping up to date. It can sometimes feel overwhelming to manage the vast amount of new research and evidence being published every day, and our resource suggestions are designed to help approach the process of keeping up to date in a more structured manner. Each week, we linked to new resources on Twitter, as well as asking for suggestions via our comments whiteboard. These are now all collected here.

Our first suggestion was to use Twitter itself to keep up to date. Many people now use social media to discuss what’s going on at the conferences they’re attending. It’s impossible to attend every conference — so why not keep track of events by following the applicable conference hashtags?

Our first suggestion is Twitter. Do you know about any big conferences happening this summer? If so, find out the conference hashtags and follow along. Does anyone have suggestions for good conference hashtags? If so, let us know! #ResourceOfTheMonth

— Cambridge Medical Library (@cam_med_lib) July 9, 2019

Secondly, we recommended setting up search alerts on databases, so that they can notify you any time a new article is published that meets your search criteria, rather than repeatedly searching each database yourself. We have a guide to setting up search alerts here.

Did you know that you can set up search alerts on all major healthcare/scientific databases? Run your search, save it, and enable email alerts so that new, relevant articles will appear in your inbox without you having to go out and find them. #ResourceOfTheMonth

— Cambridge Medical Library (@cam_med_lib) July 15, 2019

Our next suggestion was to sign up for Journal Table of Contents, a service which emails you details of the contents of new issues of your selected journal(s). We have a guide on how to set this up here.

Do you regularly read academic journals in your subject area? The Journal TOCs website can send you alerts every time a new issue is published, meaning you can check out the table of contents and read any new, interesting research. More details here: https://t.co/wnCrr8rDu0

— Cambridge Medical Library (@cam_med_lib) July 22, 2019

We also got a suggestion via our comments board to use Mendeley Suggest, which recommends new articles for you based on what you have saved in your Mendeley library. For details on Mendeley, see our teach yourself guides and videos.

Our final suggestion was to set up a journal club. The Medical Library can also help with this, so please get in touch if that’s something you’d like.

Our final recommendation for this month's resource: now might be a great time to start up a journal club. This can be a good way to familiarise yourself with new research and discuss it with colleagues. For more information on journal clubs, click here: https://t.co/EcnjkejCBz

— Cambridge Medical Library (@cam_med_lib) July 29, 2019

Do be sure to follow us on Twitter for more resources every month!