Evans Whitaker
Evans Whitaker
Whit is a Research Librarian at the UCSF Library. Contact Whit for help with clinical informatics, database searching, systematic reviews, and reference managers.

Sciwheel and Faculty Opinion Discontinued

Update July 2021: Sciwheel is still available

Due to budgetary constraints in the wake of COVID-19, our subscription to these products will end on June 8, 2021:

  • Sciwheel, a reference manager comparable to EndNote or Zotero
  • Faculty Opinion, an article recommendation service based on preferences set by the user

Transition from Sciwheel to Zotero or EndNote

This handout will walk you through the steps to move what you have stored in Sciwheel over to either Zotero or EndNote. For more information about reference managers, also see these handouts:

Upcoming classes on these reference management tools can be found on the library Events calendar.

Replacing Faculty Opinion

Free solutions

  1. You can save searches from any database about topics of interest and have new articles sent to your email or an RSS feed. Examples of databases include PubMed, Web of Science, Embase and many others. You will need to set up an account with the database for this to work. MyNCBI for PubMed is one example.
  2. Google Alerts and Google Scholar will let you do the same thing using your Google account.
google alert screenshot

Google Scholar has a create alert icon.

google scholar

Also see our in-depth guide on creating good Google/Scholar searches.

Commercial solutions

There are commercial products to alert readers to new, relevant articles as well. These two are worth a look.

  • Read is available as an app and as a web version. Set up an account and preferences to link to UCSF Library. Set topic area, topics, journals in which you are interested in preferences. You will get notifications about articles meeting the criteria you set.
  • UCSF will begin subscribing to BrowZine as part of our system-wide integrated library system migration in July. Like Read, BrowZine includes apps for iOS and Android and web version. You can look at the free (but limited) version now.