How to build your personalized open access journal (POAJ) of biomedical articles of your interest using RSS-feeds

Ever wanted to be notified, if a free full text article of your research interest is newly available in the National Library of Medicine (NLM)? Well, the NLM offers to create your own RSS feeds out of your customized searches. Here are easy step by step instructions on how to do that. Click on any image to enlarge it:

1. Go to PubMed and build your search to give you the best possible results. Perform your search.



2. Now in order to limit your search to full text articles that are freely available, click on limits.



3. Choose "Links to free full text" and all the other restrictions that might make sense for you. Display your search results with the chosen limits.



4. Scroll to the bottom of your search results and select "RSS feed" in the "send to" list. This will take you to the following page. Now you could just follow the instructions there , instead of continuing to read this blog.



5. Click on "Create Feed" and you will be taken to kind of a confirmation page.



6. Your feed will be available for you and regularly updated from now on, unless you do not access it for more than 6 months. Your reader does that for you, for as long as you subscribe to this search in your reader (and you look into your reader ;-). Just click on the XML icon and you will be taken to your feed. The exact address will appear in the address field of your browser. My browser (flock) is set up to automatically offer to subscribe the feed in Google reader every time a RSS feed is displayed.



7. You also could copy the address of the RSS feed from your browser's address field  into the subscription field of your reader. Now your are done. This is, how it will look in Google reader:



The titles of the full text articles are displayed in the reader. The list of titles will be updated, if new articles are available. Clicking on a title will display further information about the article, e.g. the authors and abstract, but also the links to the full text.



8. These steps can be repeated for any PubMed searches you are interested in. Subscribing to several search feeds will help you to stay informed in your area of expertise. Thus you can create your own personalized open access journal (POAJ). (Is it a journal 2.0?).

Btw. this is also great for: "Oh, have you read the recent article in ... by ... on ...?. You could do it on a daily basis.
;-)

Language:

Add new comment