With a new academic year pressing upon us, this week’s focus article looks at quick and easy ways to keep up-to-date with current practice.

JOURNALS
The traditional way to stay informed is through journals, magazines and newsletters. Academic journals such as Addiction often include short items of news to supplement their peer-reviewed original articles and editorials.

Some journals, however, aim specifically to inform about current developments and news in the field. Good examples are Drink and Drug News (fortnightly, published in association with FDAP and Wired, free) Drug and Alcohol Findings (quarterly, supported by Alcohol Concern, DrugScope and the National Addiction Centre, available by subscription), Druglink (bi-monthly, published by DrugScope, available to members or by subscription), and Drugs and Alcohol Today (quarterly from Pavilion Publishing by subscription).

There are also newsletters for particular disciplines or study areas. For example, Substance Misuse Management in General Practice (SMMGP) produces a free newsletter, Network, which is of use to those working in primary care. Similarly, the Institute of Alcohol Studies makes Alcohol Alert, covering news about alcohol policy, available on its website.

EMAIL LISTS
Several organisations provide news and information about new publications by email. drugs.gov.uk offers newsletters for DATs, the DIP and the FRANK Campaign as well as a general mailing. You can register for updates from the NTA, and both Home Office Research, Development and Statistics and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation provide regular news about policy direct to your Inbox. However, by far the most widely-read service is Daily Dose, which collates information from a wide range of online sources in the field.

RSS / ATOM / XML FEEDS
One of the most significant and helpful developments of recent years has been the introduction of newsfeeds. These provide quick and easy access to new information which can be accessed in one place via a newsreader such as Bloglines or, for NHS staff, NLH My Update.

I manage a large proportion of DrugScope’s grey literature and single journal article acquisitions through my Bloglines account, in which I have stored key sources (through which I know I will hear about new drug publications several times a week or more) and irregular sources (through which I can read about items on the periphery of the sector and key articles in less usual places).

At the moment, my most regularly useful feeds include JRF Findings, JRF Reports, the Drug Education Forum Blog, and several of the Biomed Central Open Access Journals, such as Substance Abuse Treatment, Prevention and Policy and the Harm Reduction Journal. I also like to monitor the NICE Homepage and published guidelines pages through their feeds on my bloglines account, and some wider general health publications, such as the BMJ and JAMA.

If you would like to find out more about feeds, there is a brief introduction here, as well as the links to this blog’s own feeds. After all, DrugData Update includes information gleaned from over a hundred RSS feeds and email lists as well as DrugData itself: most of the records we add to stock for this year’s publications are included in this blog, with details of how to obtain the full text.

The sources covered in this focus article are merely starting points. With newsfeeds and other ‘Web 2.0′ technology such as social bookmarking improving all the time, the best news of all is that you can find and manage a range of information as individual as your own professional and research interests.

Anne Welsh
Information Officer – Bibliographic Services