Current Awareness: Using RSS

Yesterday, we wrote about NIH's clinical alerts and how to subscribe using RSS. Today, I'd like to touch on the possibilities RSS presents for maintaining current awareness in the health sciences.

Subscribing to RSS feeds requires an RSS reader; Google reader and Bloglines are popular, easy-to-use services, and there are a number of free apps (Abilon, Feed Reader) that show you your feeds on your desktop or mobile device. Whatever your choice in terms of how you interact with your newsfeeds, what is ultimately useful in terms of current awareness is the ability to customize what you read; if you're interested in a specific journal, but only the articles it publishes on certain topics, you can subscribe to the journal's RSS feed but customize the reader to alert you only when those articles containing those terms are published. Or, if you're interested in hearing about breaking news on certain specific topics, that's easy too; you can even create your own feed in PubMed that will alert you whenever a term that's important to you shows up in Medline. RSS feeds are much more specific than the tables of contents distributed by journals and publishers, and can be read in a separate, customizable interface without overloading your inbox (although if you'd like feeds emailed to you, that's a possibility too!).

RSS Readers offer other important functionalities for organizing information - starring items to be read later, or tagging to allow for later searching - and for finding articles. Article information that appears in an RSS reader will be more complete than what appears in a table of contents, as well, allowing for easier navigation to the article. If you're interested in using an RSS reader to maintain current awareness, it's worthwhile to check out both RSS 4 Medics, which extols the virtues of RSS in a health sciences environment as well as curating a number of feeds, and David Rothman's post on the subject (more of a librarian-oriented perspective, but a great argument for RSS!). And, of course, feel free to contact us at Treadwell - we're more than happy to help you learn how to use this technology!