Portfolio Instructions
If you prefer, click here to watch an instructional video. If you need any additional help after reading this document, please email us.
Basic portfolio components
Authors. If you are interested in tracking papers by specific authors (e.g., your grad school advisors, classmates, colleagues, coauthors, or prominent people in your field), this tab is for you. Just type the author’s last name into the search box and select the author whose work you want to follow. You will then be notified about all working, forthcoming, and published papers by that author.
Keywords. Here, you can specify words or phrases you are interested in, and we will check each available title/abstract and alert you if there is a match. Keywords are not case-sensitive. You can specify as many individual keywords/phrases as you want.
If you want us to look for a phrase, just enter two or more words (e.g., “democratic institution”). If you want us to look for two or more words that do not necessarily occur consecutively, separate them with “&” (e.g., “risk & insurance”). To exclude words from keyword results, use a “&!” (e.g., “risk &! insurance”). The “&” and “&!” operators work with phrases too (e.g., “shock & monetary policy”; “risk & insurance &! health insurance”)!
Journals. To add your first journal, click on the “click here” text in the journal tab, and start typing the name of the journal you want to follow. Once you see the journal you want, select it, and click “add a journal”. To unfollow a journal, just click on the “x” next to its name. You can also browse and select from the entire list of journals by clicking the “View all journals” button. Don’t forget that we have some working paper series/pre-print collections as well!
Advanced options
In the keywords and authors tabs, you can change which research field(s) and/or specific journals your keyword/author results come from. To set these options, just click on the “Edit keyword options” or “Edit author options” button in the corresponding tab and choose the fields/journals you want. You can apply your keyword settings to your authors tab and vise-versa. Finally, a few highly multidisciplinary journals are not included in any default set of journals. If you want your results to include articles from Science or Nature, for example, you can add these journals to your portfolio using these keyword/author options. (You can also add these journals to your journals tab, but keep in mind that you will likely receive quite a few articles from far outside your field).
In the journals tab, you can exclude specific keywords from journal results or limit journal results to articles with particular keywords. Just click on “use advanced options” next to the journal and specify the options you want. There, you can also apply one journal’s settings to all other journals to save you time.
Tips for how to get the most out of Academic Sequitur
- Create a research portfolio, if you haven’t already. That way, you don’t have to remember to visit the website periodically or spend time looking for relevant updates – they will come to you!
- Check the “articles per week” numbers in each portfolio tab to see how many new articles you can expect for each keyword or journal and across all your authors. These numbers are updated each time you update your portfolio. We’ll also send you these statistics monthly so you can stay in control of the number of articles you are notified about.
- Omit specific keyword endings if you want a broader match. For example, the keyword “time inconsistency” will miss articles with “time inconsistent”, while “time inconsisten” will capture both variations.
- Don’t forget about our multidisciplinary journals! We assigned Science and Nature (and a few other things) to our “multidisciplinary” category, so they are by default not included in portfolio results (we did this to avoid annoying users with articles from highly unrelated fields). If you are interested in articles from these journals, be sure to add them to your author/keyword tabs using the “ADD individual journals” feature in the tabs’ options pop-up.
- If your “articles per week” count is higher than you would like, here are some tips on reducing it while maintaining relevance.
- Maximize the use of the authors and keywords tabs. Following a lot of journals can give you a lot of results, but they are less likely to be relevant and more likely to overwhelm you.
- Use compound keywords to further narrow down results. For example, “health” will give you a lot of results each week, but some might only be tangentially relevant. A term like “health & insurance” will work better (“health insurance” will require the phrase to match, while “health & insurance” will allow the two words to appear separately). So, if you’re using a very generic keyword, think about what specific topics are of interest to you.
- If you notice a lot of irrelevant articles that seem to fit a pattern, consider using the keyword “not” notation. For example, if you don’t want health papers about insurance, change the keyword to “health &! insurance”.
- Browse all-site updates periodically to find authors you know and add them to your portfolio (this is a longer-term strategy, as most authors publish 1-3 articles per year). You can add authors just by clicking on their name and then clicking “Subscribe”.