When you set an alert, you will usually be offered two options: an email alert or the creation of an RSS feed.

Receiving the results by email allows you to have the information directly available in the tool that you use most often: your email service. It is therefore easy to monitor updates. However, your inbox may quickly be swamped with emails that are not directly relevant.

To reduce this noise, it is recommended to configure the filters of your email client. The filter will be configured based on one of the alert’s constants: the sender (the source) or the message title (which can be the same as the alert subject).

An RSS feed aggregator makes it possible to display updates from databases, websites or blogs that you are monitoring on a customisable web page.

By subscribing to a feed, you direct the data to which you have subscribed to the web page you have created.

The content you are monitoring is sorted into widgets in a tool such as Netvibes. Widgets are windows that display the title of the last articles published on the monitored websites.

You can click on the titles to directly access the source. Most aggregators allow users to sort the selected sources of information into folders, tag the information to better find it later on, and easily share the information on social networks.

Alert results can also be compiled in reference management software by copy-pasting them or by importing the files.

The bibliographic reference manager provides various data processing features to make the most of the data: additional indexing, sorting, annotations, exports, creating bibliographies (refer to the guide "Bibliographic reference managers").