What is Current Awareness?

Current Awareness may be defined as:

“The process of keeping up to date with developments in a particular professional or interest area.”

Many students and academics may do this via colleagues, attendance at conferences or membership of professional institutions but there are also many resources available online that can also help with the process, and in a methodical, organised way.

Why do I need Current Awareness?

It helps you to:

• Find out latest developments in your research - with little effort you can keep on top of the very latest news in your area of interest
• Avoid embarrassing omissions - thorough research takes into account significant studies in your subject area – don’t be caught out by missing important articles or comments
• Create useful contacts - identify possible collaborators or advisers from work published
• Observe the competitors - what have they been up to recently?
• Validate your research – is it unique / been tried before? There is no point reinventing the wheel, but you might want to build on what has already been achieved…

But are online systems complicated to set up?

Not at all! Keeping up to date is very simple – and there are lots of tools and resources to help you. Because the services are personal to you, you will either need to register with a service or with some databases you may need to use your Shibboleth account.

Here’s a bit more information about common methods of keeping up to date: