Blog / Tutorial

How can I set alerts on a search / topic of interest?

Thu Mar 25 2021

scite search alerts provide a powerful way to stay up to date on emerging literature and see the scholarly conversation happening as publications and citations are made available.

By setting a search alert you will receive an email whenever we detect new publications and/or new citations to your search results. Whenever new articles are published, we will add these to your result set automatically and make sure you stay up to date on a topic of interest.

In this guide we will show you how to:

  • Make and save a search for a topic of interest
  • Set publication and citation alerts on that search
  • Manage alerts
  • Create a dashboard from your search results to evaluate your results in a central place

scite Advanced Search allows you to search over 100m publications by publication metadata, such as authors, journal, year, title, abstract, and more, and scite-specific data such as citation classification tallies, editorial notices, types of papers, and more. For a more comprehensive outline of how scite Advanced Search works see “how does scite search work?” https://help.researchsolutions.com/hc/en-us/categories/31947397460116-Scite

In this guide, we will use the topic of protein folding to make our search. Specifically, we want to stay updated on heavily contrasted studies of protein folding. To do this we will search for an exact title match of “protein folding” with at least 1 contrasting citation and order those results by most contrasts (see the search here).

Once our search is made we can save it by clicking on the “save search” button at the top of the page near the search results and ordering box. When this is clicked you will see a form where you can name your search and set notifications for.

save search

By hitting save with both of these toggles on (newly detected Smart Citations and newly detected publications), your search results will be saved and you will start receiving alerts whenever the result set grows (new publications) or the results receive citations (new Smart Citations).

If you intend to make a search alert or dashboard, It is important to note that premium users have a limit of 1000 results. If you would like us to raise this limit for you please let us know.

Tips on keeping your search under the limit

Here are some tips on keeping your search under the limit of 1000 DOIs:

  • Use the year filter so that your search captures the most recent literature.
  • Turn the “has cites” filter on to only receive updates when publications have citations.
  • Drag citations sliders so that you are searching for results that have at least 1 supporting or contrasting citation.

Managing Alerts

To manage the alerts you have set, you need to go to your profile (https://scite.ai/users/me) and click on the “Saved Searches” section. From there you will be able to delete a saved search (which will delete both alerts) or simply turn off a specific alert.

manage alerts

Create a dashboard from your search results

Now that you have alerts set you will start receiving emails whenever new publications or citations are added to the result set of contrasted protein folding studies.

Another powerful way you can use saved searches is turning them into dashboards. This can be easily done by clicking the ellipsis button and selecting “Create Dashboard”

create dashboard

The dashboard may take a while to create but once it is done you will be able to evaluate your set of results and export data about them for further analysis (see the resulting dashboard: https://scite.ai/dashboard/protein-folding-ZNy).

protein folding dashboard