Keeping up with the latest research in your field is essential to maintaining an ethically responsible mental health practice. However, unlike our salaried colleagues in the academic community, we have limited time for reading journal articles.
One way to stay abreast of current research is via news stories and press releases. From the titles and brief descriptions, you can easily pick out topics that are directly related to your interests. Furthermore, news stories and press releases usually include names of researchers, whom you can contact for more information and/or copies of their articles.
Here are some reliable sources for mental health research news:
APA website
The PsycPORT Newswire aggregates links to news stories from various media sources.
APA also issues their own press releases.
If you're an APA member, you can sign up to receive research alerts via email. Each week you will get links to summaries of articles that match your preference. To set up alerts, log into your APA account and go to MyAPA. Select "Alerts" from the menu.
Eurekalert
Eurekalert.org, operated by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, aggregates news stories and press releases on a wide variety of topics from academic, medical and government institutions. Here's a link to the latest news in the Social and Behavior category.
Mental Health Research Network
MHRN describes its mission:
The Mental Health Research Network, through support from the National Institute of Mental Health, is the nation’s preeminent source of population-based research on mental health, partnering with health systems that finance and provide care of a diverse population of over 12.5 million people in 15 states to:
- Identify research questions that matter to patients, healthcare providers, and healthcare systems
- Efficiently answer those questions involving real-world patients and providers
- Disseminate and implement research results
National Institute of Mental Health
NIMH offers links to news, videos and social media related to NIMH-funded research programs. The agency also offers personalized guidance in finding and interpreting research results.
Science Daily
Science Daily has a section for mental health research news. You might want to check out some of their other categories, including "Quirky."
When you're looking for recent research on a specific topic, try Google Scholar. You can filter by date, or use their advanced search window to narrow the scope of your results. You can also sign up for email alerts from Google Scholar, based on keywords that you enter.
The regular Google search engine is also useful. Once you enter your keywords, you'll see this at the top of your search results:
Select "News" then "Tools" to show additional filters. Under Recent, you can select news items within various time frames, down to the past hour.
Social Media
Twitter is used by journalists and by researchers to post links to news stories and press releases on various topics. Search by keyword or hashtag - you need not have a Twitter account to search. You can also set up lists that filter for specific journalists and others whom you want to follow.
To search several social media platforms at once try SocialMention or SocialSearcher. These will give you results from Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and others.
Set up News Alerts
Get notified by email when a topic or keyword is mentioned in a news article. It's free and easy to set up at Google Alerts. Also check out SocialSearcher and Mention.
Some news organizations, such as New York Times and BBC, allow you to set up alerts for topics or keywords in their news stories, and to receive notifications via email, text or designated app.
Set up RSS feeds
When you see this symbol 
on a website, you can "subscribe" to new content from that site, and have it delivered to your personalized RSS feed reader such as Feedly. You'll find many other RSS reader apps in Android Apple app stores.
Using an RSS app enables you to subscribe to multiple feeds from various websites, blogs and social media sites and view them all within your RSS reader on your computer or your mobile device, without needing to hop from one website or app to another.
