Six ways to use ticTOCs, the free journal tables of contents service

There’s a number of different ways that you can use ticTOCs - the journal tables of contents service.  These are my top six:

1. The most obvious way to use ticTOCs is to ‘Search for TOCs’ for a particular journal title, or for journals on a particular subject or by a particular publisher, and then view the most recent Table of Content (TOC) (by clicking on the title), expand any item of interest to see more details (where the publisher has made these available), and click on article titles to get the full text (where institutional or personal subscription allows).  In this way, and even if you don’t have access to the full text of everything, you can keep up with the latest articles being published.  ticTOCs now contains TOCs for over 12,000 scholarly journals from 436 publishers. This is by no means all of the scholarly journals being published, but it does include journals from most large publishers.

2. If you want to keep up-to-date with what’s being published on a regular basis, then you can register with ticTOCs (it’s free), and then select and add your favourite journals to MyTOCs by ticking the checkboxes from your search results and clicking Add. This will permanently save your selected journals.  The next time you return to ticTOCs and Sign In, any journal TOCs with new content will appear in bold in your MyTOCs.  All you have to do is remember to return to ticTOCs at regular intervals.

3. The third thing you can do is export a particular TOC feed to another feedreader, such as Bloglines or Newsgator, or a service such as Netvibes or Pageflakes.  To do this, ‘Search for TOCs’ for a particular journal title, or for journals on a particular subject or by a particular publisher, and then view the most recent Table of Content (TOC) (by clicking on the title).  Then click on the Export feed to… button and make your choice of feed readers.

4.  As the Organization Monkey blog has shown, and as detailed in the ticTOCs Help page, if you select a number of journals of interest in MyTOCs, and then click on the Export Selected button, you can create an OPML file containing details of your selected TOCs, and then import that file into another feedreader, such as Google Reader.  This allows to to export a number of TOC feeds all in one go.

5. The fourth thing you can do is link to a particular journal TOC.  To do this, ‘Search for TOCs’ and when the one you are interested in is included in the left hand panel, right click on the title and select ‘Copy Link Location’ or ‘Copy Shortcut’ (depending on the browser you are using) and then you can use that web addess to link to the TOC of that journal.  For example, http://www.tictocs.ac.uk/?action=displayJournal&journalId=15711 takes you to the TOC of  International Journal of Business and Emerging Markets takes, displayed within ticTOCs, and http://www.tictocs.ac.uk/?action=displayJournal&journalId=9512 takes you to the TOC of Managerial Finance, etc.  Librarians, in particular, should find this useful, as there’s no need to confuse readers with details of RSS!  In a similar way, if you are a publisher or the webmaster of a journal’s home page, you can put a link to the ticTOCs address for that journal so that anyone can easily view the latest TOC.  For example, the Journal of Information Literacy (JIL) has done this.  Here’s another example.

6. The sixth thing you can do is export a bibliographic reference to RefWorks. To do this, click on the   image. Of course, you, or your institution, will need to have a subscription to RefWorks for this to work. We’re working on introducing some more bibliographic management tools.

Roddy MacLeod
ticTOCs Management Support

About these ads