2009 (01) February »
Tools and Treasures from the Web: Track What’s New in Your Favorite Journals via RSS
Author: Bill Warters
Many of our readers are now familiar with RSS news readers and the valuable role they can play in organizing and tracking multiple sources of information. If you aren’t clear on how they work, have no fear. You can get up to speed quickly by watching the online video “RSS in Plain English.”
Most people use news readers to follow favorite blogs or topical news, but there are lots of other kinds of content that can be tracked using RSS (Really Simple Syndication), the “secret sauce” that makes news readers work. For example, perhaps you have half a dozen academic journals that you try to keep current with in your discipline or special interest area. Many journals now produce an RSS feed that enables you to go to one place, your own news reader, and see the titles (always) and abstracts (sometimes…) for newly published articles.
The trick to making this work is knowing where to go to find the RSS feeds for the journals you care about. Fortunately, our colleagues at the University of Saskatchewan Library have developed a very extensive list of academic journal news feeds provided by different publishers. Get started by visiting Publishers/Sources Providing RSS Feeds for Electronic Journals and then choose a publisher to browse. My personal favorite collection is IngentaConnect, which provides more than 4,500 individual journal feeds that can be tracked. Wayne State happens to be an IngentaConnect subscriber, so WSU students and faculty have access to most of these journals if you see an article that looks promising and you want to see the full text version.
Once you’ve found a journal title that you want to follow recent publications in, you copy the link attached to the little orange RSS “chicklet” for that journal, and use that weblink as the journal subscription address in your RSS newsreader. For instance, say I’m interested in tracking the Negotiation Journal. The link provided by IngentaConnect for this journal’s recent contents is http://api.ingentaconnect.com/content/klu/nego/latest?format=rss
I copy this link and then go over to Bloglines.com, my current newsreader of choice (there are many free readers available), log into my account and choose “Add Subscription” from the menu. I paste in the Negotiation Journal link and presto, from now on, every time I review my Bloglines news items, I’ll see a listing for the latest articles from this journal with the newest items on top and a link to more information.
If this approach appeals to you, WSU Librarian Michael Sensiba has developed a useful WSU-specific Subject Guide on Content Alert services. The guide includes listings of content collections WSU has access to that provide RSS feeds, as well as information on other alert tools such as email announcements and saved searches. You can find this online at
http://www.lib.wayne.edu/resources/subject_guides/guide.php?id=214
Be in the know. Use RSS!
