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RSS Feeds & Email Alerts

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Gain more control over and access to information that you request using email alerts and RSS feeds. Library databases and publishers often offer personal accounts for saved customized searches. Email alert services send periodic emails detailing your search results. Many offer RSS feeds allowing you to monitor web sites and databases for new information, without having to visit the site or database.

What is RSS?

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is an XML format for sharing headlines and other Web content, allowing users to browse headlines with a news-reader or aggregator program. The RSS news-reader or aggregator checks RSS-enabled Web pages and then organizes and displays any new or updated articles that it finds. Aggregators are typically constructed as extensions to a Web browser (such as Mozilla Firefox), as extensions to an email program (such as Microsoft Outlook), or as standalone programs. There are also Web-based RSS aggregators such as My Yahoo or Bloglines that require no software installation and make the user’s RSS feeds available on any computer with Web access.

Learn more about RSS:

To subscribe to a RSS feed, look for the RSS feed icons, XML feed icon , RSS feed icon , or RSS feed icon . Though the process for adding a subscription varies from reader to reader, you may be able to subscribe by simply dragging the icon to your reader. Alternately, you may need to copy and paste the URL of the feed into your RSS reader or aggregator. Some browsers, including Firefox, Opera and Safari, automatically check for feeds for you when you visit a website, and display an icon when they find one. For more details on these, please check their websites.

Convert RSS Feeds into Email Alerts

If you prefer email alerts to RSS readers and aggregators, there are several services available on the web that will convert RSS feeds into email alerts. Suggested services include:

Finding Feeds for Research

The home page of an electronic journal will often list or link to a feed for the journal’s table of content. Publishers will often host a page listing RSS feeds for all of their journals. Databases such as ISI Web of Science (see ISI RSS faqs) and PubMed (email through My NCBI, RSS through PubMed) provide database search alerts via email or RSS feed.

Becker Library now provides easy access to the RSS feeds of many prominent scientific journals through the library’s web site and catalog. The Selected Journals TOCs page provides quick links to several major publications, including the Archives of Internal Medicine, Cell, JAMA, and the New England Journal of Medicine. Just click on the journal name or RSS icon and go directly to the journal’s current table of contents.

The Becker catalog also provides links to the current table of contents to over 1,000 medical and scientific journals. If you browse the alphabetical list of journal titles, you’ll see “RSS available” in orange next to the titles for which RSS feeds are available. If you use a keyword search, you’ll see a note and the orange RSS icon. The RSS icon is a hyperlink directly to the journal’s RSS feed. There are also orange RSS icons and links to the current table of content on the catalog records of journals.

For more RSS feeds related to medicine, try:

What about Blogs?

To find out where or if a specific topic is being discussed on blogs, try

Visit the Becker Blogs:

Available News Feeds from Becker

Bernard Becker Medical Library News & Information

To receive the news, features, and items of interest from the Becker Medical Library, paste the following URL into your preferred RSS reader: http://becker.wustl.edu/rss/BBMLnews.php

or click on this link: RSS Feed RSS feed

New Acquisitions at Becker

To receive a weekly list of recent book purchases and alerts about other new acquisitions,paste the following URL into your preferred RSS reader: http://becker.wustl.edu/rss/BBMLacquisitions.php

or click on this link: RSS Feed RSS feed

Bioinformatics@Becker

To receive the news, features, and items of interest about Bioinformatics and other research news from the Becker Medical Library, paste the following URL into your preferred RSS reader: http://beckerinfo.net/bioinformatics/feed/

or click on this link: RSS Feed RSS feed

Becker Medical Library Consumer Health News

To receive selected recently published news and features about Consumer Health issues and trends, paste the following URL into your preferred RSS reader: http://becker.wustl.edu/rss/BBMLconsumer.xml

or click on this link: RSS Feed RSS feed