It’s fairly common for researchers to monitor a specific topic they are interested in. In the case of Mednar, it’s often a specific disease or a specific treatment regime. An alert in Explorit works just like an Google Alert.  After creating an account, you can login into thealerts section of Mednar. Click on the “create” button and you be presented with a form for creating an alert.

It’s here where we can begin to see the real power of alerts. Alerts allow you to monitor a specific search term in a wide variety of search fields. For example in Mednar users can search in full text, title and author. You can also monitor multiple fields at the same time. This allows you for example to monitor the work by a specific author on a specific topic.

You can also select which databases on which to run an alert. Alerting isn’t a commonly supported feature by many sources since alerting requires a significant allocation of hardware resources. This allows you overlay this significant functionality over multiple databases and have presentation normalized.

For Mednar Alerts you can select the alerting interval (most users select weekly) and have the option of having your alert delivered either via RSS or ATOM. This opens even more possibilities for the sophisticated user. You can take that RSS feed and consume it in an internal CMS or add the feed to your blog. It makes it easy to share the information with other users or consume the information in your intranet.

Alerting makes it easy to track information and discover what other people might be doing in your field. It’s a feature on many of our web sites such as Mednar, Biznar, and many of our customers such as Science.gov and Scitopia.