ABOUT ALERTING SERVICES
Alerting services provide notification via email or RSS of newly published research based on user-defined criteria. Learning about alerts and establishing alerts specific to your research areas can help to keep you current and save you time.
Journal Table of Contents (TOC) Alerts and Search Alerts are the two basic types of alerts.
JOURNAL TABLE OF CONTENTS ALERTS
A journal table of contents alert sends you the table of contents of a particular journal (usually by email, sometimes available by RSS) when a new journal issue is published.
SEARCH ALERTS
Search alerts notify you when new articles are available matching a pre-defined search. When setting up a search alert, you can choose how often you would like to receive an alert and how you would like to receive it (either through email or through an RSS feed).
DATABASES PROVIDING ALERTING SERVICES
ProQuest, Project Muse, EBSCOhost, ScienceDirect, PubMed and CQ Researcher are some of the databases or database vendors that provide alerting services.
RSS ("Really Simply Syndication" or "Rich Site Summary")
RSS feeds 
deliver online content to a feed reader as an XML file. You can subscribe to RSS feeds with a web-based "feed reader" such as Google Reader or Bloglines; there are also a variety of other free feed readers that may be downloaded to your PC, rather than accessed through a specific web account.
SETTING UP SEARCH ALERTS -- SPECIFICS
In many of our eReources, a link is sometimes provided to offer journal alerts, automated searches or some other subscription service.
Currently, if you are working from off campus your RSS search alert or RSS search feed will be completely functional for reading titles and abstracts. However, when you click on the title to access the full text of the article, you will not abe able to access it; you will only be able to access the full article if you first login to Sentry and then go to the database and retrieve the article. (We are working on how to make this feature more seemless and will notify you when a more seemless process in place).
Here is an example of an RSS alert:
http://rss.ebscohost.com/AlertSyndicationService/Syndication.asmx/GetFeed?guid=123456