Using RSS to Stay Hyper-Current on the Literature

Another tip from Liz, who writes that it has "allowed me to be almost more
on top of the literature than my supervisor (in terms of finding articles,
anyway)" :

"Ok, so the first step is to turn on your RSS feed reader of choice (I use
google reader, because I check it obsessively for non-academic reasons).
Then, you can do a little bit of research and most journals that publish
online have feeds of the articles that come out as soon as they're
available online.

For example, Journal of Vision (which I believe is online-only) has a feed
link on their website. Vision Research I had to get through ScienceDirect.
I have four journals on my list (JOV, VR, IEEE: PAMI, and JOSA) and I get
2-4 new articles to check out per day. Usually this means skimming the
title and deciding I don't care/don't understand any of the words (I'm
looking at you, JOSA). However, I have found several gems and it's fun to
get them hot off the presses, so to speak. If the abstract (delivered to
my feed reader) is promising, I just download the pdf and enter into my
extremely efficient reference management system.

If you find some way to automate the reading part, let me know :P.

PRO TIP: If you don't already, use your feed reader to subscribe to
something fun like a comic (or five). That will keep you checking it on a
regular basis and comics won't derail you for long."

A good one! I experimented with using google reader for this for a while,
but I tend to use it exclusively for fun stuff - so I can avoid getting
into the habit of checking it during work time. Instead I have been using
email journal alerts, which also works really well, and there's one for
almost every journal (ScienceDirect can cover a few, and then others send
out their own). Whenever a new issue comes out I instantly get an email
with the table of contents, and like Liz I quickly scan it and only read
the abstract of a few, and then add even fewer to my Someday/Maybe reading
list. However at the moment I have a little backlog of those emails in my
Deferred folder (more about my email system in a future posting) so maybe
it's worth considering Liz's method, and interspersing the casual blog
entries with the science headlines.

By the way, if you read any blogs whatsoever regularly, google reader is a
must. It's one of those things that a friend said, "oh my god, you're not
using it?" and I was initially irritated and skeptical but then had to
admit he was right.