So, while I am happy that PLoS is thinking about how we will struggle, in the future, to find and prioritize papers worth reading, I thought it would be helpful to outline my strategy for using RSS feeds for journals, authors, keywords, and citations. When this happens, it might necessitate the type of post-publication ranking systems that PLoS is trying to implement now. Ultimately if PLoS1 is successful in absorbing all of Pubmed, sorting through the literature will become a bit harder.

Second, to bring your attention to papers in the journals that you otherwise wouldn’t read, you can use a series of RSS feeds for keyword, author, and citation-based searches. Despite its flaws, I know that I’m more likely to want to read a paper in Nature than a paper in PLoS1 (sorry, Mike!). Staying on top of the literature leverages on our current journal stratification system. Therefore, the first level of finding most (but not all) of the relevant papers is using RSS to follow the big weekly journals, a few bimonthly journals, and about a dozen monthly journals. It doesn’t take that much time (a few hours per week, most of which is while walking or waiting) and I almost never miss papers that I should have read.įirst, you need to define a set of journals that have most of the papers you want to read. I consider scanning and reading papers to be one of my most important and enjoyable responsibilities as a scientist. I find it very easy to stay on top of the literature. This idea is even part of the motivation for a company started by some friends of mine (PubChase, which is part of ZappyLabs).

This is a widely held idea, but it rings completely false to me. One of the ideas that emerged in the interview - an idea that got me a bit fired up - was that PLoS is motivated to create this tool to help researchers sort through the massive and overwhelming scientific literature. I was already primed to rant about this issue because I had participated in a follow up interview with a staff member at PLoS about their new structured post-publication review tool earlier in the day. Jaime - should I use RSS or Twitter to stay tuned into what is being published in different journals? Yesterday I got an email from a colleague: The Fraser Lab Method of Following the Scientific LiteratureĪ guide to using RSS Feeds to quickly scan and triage the scientific literature by James Fraser

What is the best rss reader