Stay Up to Date on Current Research with RSS
Posted by Vincent | Filed under Organizing, Productivity, Software
Since I entered grad school, one thing I have been struggling with is trying to keep up with all the current research being published. In finance, there are three top journals (Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics and Review of Financial Studies), so in order to stay current my routine was to go on each of their website monthly (or more often bi-monthly) to look at the new papers. However, that meant looking at about 40-50 papers, so I usually picked only a few papers based on the title and authors and only looked at the abstracts for those papers. It’s not that I wasn’t interested in the other papers, it’s just that it seemed too time consuming to look at all of those papers in one session.
I’ve been a big user of RSS for a while now, subscribing to dozens of blogs (to subscribe to PS, use the big subscribe link in the top-right corner), news service and craigslist search results. Lately, I realized that the publishers of the top finance journals – Elsevier, Wiley InterScience and Oxford Journals – all offer RSS feeds to subscribe to the journals.
Obviously, you still need a paid subscription (usually through your institution) to access the full papers, but the convenience of RSS subscriptions is a big time saver for me. Not all journals are created equal however. For JF and RFS, I get the list of papers only when a new issue comes out. For JFE (published by Elsevier), I get frequent updates whenever a paper gets accepted for publication.
No matter what your field is, I’m confident that the most important journals should have RSS feeds too. If they don’t, it’s probably just a matter of time (but you can speed things up by emailing the publisher).
If your don’t already have a RSS feed reader, the most popular one (according to the stats of PS) are Google Reader and NewsGator Online.
On my Mac I use NetNewsWire, a free feed reader that syncs with its companion app on iPhone and iPod Touch. The windows software from the same company, FeedDemon, also syncs with the iPhone app. You can also subscribe directly in Firefox or Safari.
July 13, 2009 at 7:01 am
Great Idea! I’m going to look into this right now.
PS, I just started using Google Reader again. It has had some updates since I last used it, and it works much better now.
April 1, 2011 at 8:20 am
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