If you’re an information professional using the Dialog^® platform and Dialog^® Alerts Manager, you might have noticed a new feature appear recently – self-service alerts!

In a nutshell, self-service alerts give information professionals the ability to create alerts that end-users can subscribe to.

It means end-users can independently follow your research and receive relevant results, allowing you to build complex search strategies (using the built in ‘hedge’ feature for common search terms) that end-users can subscribe to at the click of a button.

This helps end-users to become more self-sufficient by being able to subscribe to your alerts themselves. It also saves you time, as you don’t have to answer as many individual research queries.

The self-service alert tool can also help you prove the value you deliver as an information professional to the rest of your organisation. You can see how many people have subscribed to your alerts and so demonstrate how many people your research is helping.

To make it easier for your end-users to find the alerts they need, we’ve added a custom topic system. This means alerts can be grouped according to topic (e.g. department, therapeutic area, drug) so users only need to sign up to the ones they need. The topics can also have further sub-topics added so that large amounts of alerts can be easily organised and searched. But, you don’t need to share your alerts until you’re ready to (or at all) – you’re the one who controls whether self-service alerts are available or not.

Using Dialog Self-Service Alerts

It is really easy to get started using the self-service alerts. All you need is a Dialog administrator account with an alert already created.

The first step is then to log into Dialog and open the Dialog Alerts Manager by clicking on ‘Alerts Manager’ in the top right of the Dialog home page:

From here, click on ‘Shared Alerts’ to access the self-service alert area and start adding alerts to the topics that you’ve created:

What’s next?

We’re going to be refining and updating the self-service alerts functionality over the next couple of months, and we’ll let you know when we add new functionality. Things we’ve got in the pipeline include more data for proving the value of your alerts and alert sharing at a user-level.

Please let us know how you’re getting on with self-service alerts, and if there’s any features and functionality you’d like us to include in future releases – just drop us an email at customer@dialog.com.

Alternatively, if you’d like to speak to us about using Dialog Alerts Manager in your organisation, get in touch with us here.