University Libraries

RSS for Biologists

Why?

• Get current citations, news headlines, etc., tailored to your interests, delivered to your computer without clogging your email | Staying Current with Science Blogs & Wikis, slide show by Patricia Anderson, Univ. of Michigan
• Deal with news on your time schedule, rather than when it comes to your inbox.

How

• What is RSS, from Univ. of California, Santa Cruz, Science & Engineering Library. This site features two very short Quick Movies, about half-way down the page, about using Bloglines. It also has a nice list of Sample Feeds; I have listed some more below.
• RSS Feeds & Email Alerts (from Becker Medical Library)
• Getting Started with RSS, from Univ. of California, San Diego, Science & Engineering Library. Another very nice list of RSS Feeds for Science & Engineering
• Getting Started with RSS: The Fifteen-Minute Tutorial (using Bloglines)
• What is RSS and how do I use it?, includes links to a couple of short videos also.
• RSS: A Quick Start Guide for Educators [ 11 page pdf ]
• How to Use Google Reader, approx. 9 minute tutorial from Yukon College site.
• News aggregators; Web-based RSS readers
• uBioRSS is a customizable current awareness tool that uses RSS and doesn't require a special news aggregator. After you establish your free account, you choose what sources you want monitor (among many websites, new journal issues or any RSS sources you choose to add; there are several possible sources of journal RSS feeds below.) Then bookmark the site and check it routinely. If your research interests can be limited to specific broad or narrow taxonomic groups, this site is even better because it can be set to filter for those if you wish.
• Help? I have limited experience using Bloglines, but I'd be happy to work with W.U. Biofolk who have questions or would like some help. Contact Ruth Lewis.

Suggested RSS Feeds for Biofolk

• Biology Library News, an experimental blog version of the Biology Library News and New Books List. In addition to getting anything new whenever you wish, this allows you to add public comments and questions as you are reading items. |
• Biology Library New Journal Issues Received, daily list of print journals in the library. |
• RSS Feeds & Email Alerts (from Becker Medical Library) feeds on library news, acquisitions, bioinformatics and consumer health

More suggestions

• Database and Search Engine Alerts
• Many journals offer various RSS feeds or, if that's not available, your can create your own by doing a saved journal search in PubMed or some other database that supports RSS. Examples:
  Using RSS Feeds to Keep Current with Medical Literature, RSS links for many journals now available in Becker Library Catalog
  Science RSS feeds
  Nature News feeds; Nature podcasts (audio files summarizing major articles each week); Nature's blogs: Action Potential (from Nature Neuroscience), Free Association (from Nature Genetics), Nascent (from Nature Publishing Group)
  New Scientist feeds (for full articles from some entries, you will need to click on institutional IP login)
  American Chemical Society journals
  Many Highwire journals with RSS feeds (sign on required; registration is free, or create your own link since the RSS links seem to be consistently formed, e.g. base-URL/rss/current.xml, so the RSS feed link for Behavioral Ecology is http://beheco.oxfordjournals.org/rss/current.xml; the RSS feed link for Genes & Development is http://www.genesdev.org/rss/current.xml
  Ingenta: Subscribing to RSS Feeds; there are hundreds of Biology/Life Sciences journals available via Ingenta
  All the Synergy Journals now have RSS feeds available for tables of contents or Search alerts. The Search in Synergy is nice because you can limit to subject groupings of journals if you wish.
  University of Saskatchewan Library E-Journals with RSS feeds
  Univ. of Calif. San Diego Science & Engineering - Journals with RSS feeds
• Saved PubMed searches - PubMed send to RSS Tutorial - this can be subject searches, journal name (for tables of contents every time a new issue is indexed), author names, etc. | How To: Create an RSS Feed for a Feedless Journal with PubMed | How to: Generate a Custom RSS feed from PubMed (tutorials from David Rothman)
• Findarticles.com offers RSS feeds on searches; note this is a free search site with lots of annoying pop-ups, but it does index a few important science journals. I expect many other databases will offer RSS feeds of their alerting services in the future. If your favorite database doesn't, ask them to implement it!
• Community of Science Funding News
• New dissertations in ProQuest Dissertations & Theses database; the Biological Sciences feeds available are Animal Physiology, Cellular, Ecology, Genetics, Microbiology, and Molecular.

Blogs, News Magazines, etc.

• Seed Magazine, Science is Culture
• The Tangled Bank - biweekly collection of "good" blog writing in biology, medicine, or natural history, hosted a various sites; Grand Rounds - weekly collection from medical blogs.
• Postgenomic.com (recent hot papers) - collates posts from many life sciences blogs; you can filter by categories, e.g., Genetics, Ecology, Biochemistry, etc. Most entries also link to PubMed record.
• Science Headlines from the New York Times
• Science journalism: Knight Science Journalism Tracker
• NPR RSS feeds, for examples: Science Friday or Health & Science
• Other Biological, Scientific or Technological Newsfeeds
• Web Feeds for Science Librarians, lists lots of science publishers and science libraries; not very heavy on biology stuff however.
• Science Web Feeds
• Would you like an alert when your "favorite" entries in Wikipedia are revised? There are rss or atom links on the left margin of the "history" page of each entry. Just copy the feed link into your favorite RSS reader. For example:
  RNA entry | RNA history page | RNA rss or RNA atom
• Many aggregators have subject searchable files of RSS sources, for example, Bloglines Search
• Warning: While RSS can contribute to your efficiency, it can also eat up a LOT of time!! Proceed with caution. There are probably hundreds of blogs with less formal, interesting writing. Here's a few random examples: scienceblogs.com (combined posts from several blogs), Pharyngula (Science, atheism, liberal politics from a biology professor at the University of Minnesota, Morris), Pharyngula - Science Content only, BioBlogs (bioinformatics and computational biology)), Evolutionblog (Commentary on developments in the endless dispute between evolution and creationism), Young Female Scientist, Science Woman, Birding Babylon, Adventures in Ethics and Science, Biology Refugia (A mob-weblog about ecology, evolution and biodiversity, and other aspects of biology), GMO Food for Thought, LabLit.com, the culture of science in fiction & fact, Discovering Biology in a Digital World, Top 5 science blogs, compiled by Nature, July, 2006, 50 popular science blogs, look at the blogroll of your favorite blogger for more ideas, ........