Search challenge 8: strategies

I know, I've gotten behind in the search challenges -- I've realized that they take a little more time to pull together than I had expected (mostly because I love searching so much that I can't help but spend time in the search..), so I'm going to start posting them on a monthly basis, rather than weekly, to give myself and all the wonderful commenters a chance to really kick the tires of each of these... I'll post the new challenge and the preceding strategies, on the first Tuesday of every month, starting Tuesday June 3rd.


Until then, thoughts on search challenge 8 with help from Matt and Rachel, the two commenters on this challenge...

Tips for setting up automatic searches in PubMed using MyNCBI--
- using the preview/index feature to search for alternate spellings/misspellings for your institution's name, the authors you want to track, and OR-ing them all together
- building a search hedge using the author names for a given department (right now I'm working on one that tracks all of our Biomedical Informatics faculty publications, in a few different databases)

Other tips: using Google Alerts, topix.net, the librarian's RSS engine LibWorm, automated searches in other databases (e.g. Web of Science, CINAHL)

Who to share search results with: opportunities for communicating with institutional leadership, the communications/PR department, other departments in the institution that publish or otherwise appear in the news media frequently, the institution's office of Research or equivalent body.

Other thoughts or suggestions?

Will post the next challenge on June 3rd!