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The Graduate Health & Life Sciences Research Library at Georgetown University Medical Center

Searching for Animal Alternatives

Resource guide for helping members of the GUMC community comply with IACUC requirements and perform searches based on the 3Rs

RefWorks Tutorials

Need help learning to manage your citations and create bibliographies according to a specific citation style, please contact DML Reference. Help yourself by viewing these resources.

Saving Searches and Creating Alerts

Saving the search (or at least components of the search) will help to reduce the stress and time needed in the future from manually having to recreate each search;

And, alerts can be created so that you are immediately notified when new articles are added to each database that match your saved criteria.

Within PubMed MEDLINE, you can create a My NCBI account to save searches, create alerts, customize filters, and more.

Creating a new account

  1. Open the above PubMed MEDLINE link
  2. In the top right corner, click "Log in"
  3. Along the bottom, click "New here? Sign up"
  4. Connect an existing related account or create a new NCBI account (with your email), or click "more sign up options" to login with your Georgetown NetID and password
  5. Fill out the form and complete any confirmation steps

Saving a search

  1. Login to your My NCBI account
  2. Conduct a search, view results pages
  3. Select "Create alert" under the search box
  4. Rename your search (optional)
  5. Decide at what frequency you would like to receive updates, if you would like email alerts
  6. Re-run saved searches by visiting your My NCBI Dashboard and clicking on the search in the "Saved Searches" tile that you wish to re-run

Customizing Filters

  1. Enter My NCBI Dashboard
  2. On the filters tile, click "Manage Filters"
  3. Browse/Search for PubMed filters Select “Properties” radio button
  4. Expand menus [+] and check the boxes of your preferred filters
  5. Chosen filters will show up in “Your PubMed filter list” and on your results pages
  6. Create a custom filter by clicking “Create custom filter” button. This is how you can create a filter for a specific journal or author
  7. (You can only have a maximum of 15 active PubMed filters at a time)

Within all Ovid databases, you can create a free personal account. This will allow you to save searches, set up alerts, and more.

Creating a new account

  1. Open either of the above Ovid database links
  2. Along the top, click "My Account"
  3. On the right, click "Create Account"
  4. Fill out the form and click "Create Account"

Saving a search

  1. Select individual search and click Save OR If you want to save all searches, click the "Save All" button
  2. On the next screen, add a search name and comment (optional, but adding the database name and/or date might be helpful)
  3. Keep Type as "Permanent" and click "Save" button

Create an Alert

  1. Select individual search and click Save OR If you want to save all searches, click the "Save All" button
  2. On the next screen, add a search name and comment (optional, but adding the database name and/or date might be helpful)
  3. Change Type to "AutoAlert (SDI)" and customize the delivery and scheduling options
  4. Click "Save" button

Customize the Limits Display

  1. When you are logged in to your personal account, click "Edit Limits"
  2. Select all of the limits you would like to display on the main search page
  3. Click "Customize Limits" button

Within Web of Science, you can register for your own account to save searches, create alerts, and more.

Creating a new account

  1. Open the above Web of Science link
  2. In the top right corner, click "Sign In" > "Register"
  3. Enter your email address and click "Continue"
  4. You should receive an email with a verification code?
  5. Wait until after March 20th to complete these steps

Saving a search or creating an alert

  1. Login to your Web of Science account
  2. Conduct your search(es), and on the results page, on the left, click "Create an alert"
  3. Name the search/alert
  4. If you only want to save the search, deselect "Send me email alerts"
  5. If you want to receive email notifications, keep "Send me email alerts" selected
  6. Click "Create Account"

Citation Management Tools

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