Resource of the week: JournalTOCs

What is it?
JournalTOCs is a Table of Contents service. With JournalTOCs you can sign up for new issue alerts for the journals most important to your work. When a new issue is published, you will be alerted as to its table of contents. To use JournalTOCs you need to be using an RSS feeds reader such as NetVibes, or using the RSS feeds functionality of a program such as Microsoft Outlook.

Why use it?
For anyone doing research that requires staying up-to-date with the latest developments in their field, keeping track of the journal literature can sometimes be difficult. JournalTOCs provides a one-stop-shop for finding Table of Contents provided as RSS feeds. You can select all the journals in which you’re interested, and then export a file of those feeds to your favourite RSS feeds reader. You will then only need to check in one place to keep up-to-date with contents of new issues of all the journals you use.

Tables of Contents in e-journal catalogue records

You may have noticed that many of our catalogue records for e-journals now include the tables of contents (TOC) of the latest issue, with links to each article. For example, take a look at Nature.

We pull in the table of contents using the publisher's RSS feed via the JournalTOCs service, which sprang from the ticTOCs service that we led.

This is an experimental service and we are aware of some glitches. In some cases the article links might lead to a site where we don't have access to the journal, even though we do have access to the journal elsewhere. We link to articles via EZproxy for off-campus access but this sometimes leads to an EZproxy error message because we try link to a site that EZproxy doesn't know about.

We are endeavouring to minimise the number of such dead-ends, but if you do get led astray then follow our main 'View this journal online' link to visit the site where we can access the journal online (though it is possible that we don't have access to the latest issues, especially if our main link leads to a full-text database from EBSCO or ProQuest).

We welcome your feedback about whether you find this service useful, and please let us know about any glitches and we'll try to put them right, within reason.