What do people use nowadays as #RSSReaders? (Does the concept even still exist?)
It’s to keep track of relevant #ResearchPapers of interest as my main source used to be… Twitter and ResearchGate, which I’ll both be leaving before 2024
RSS is still very much alive. For your specific use case I suggest you try Zotero rather than a general RSS reader.
You can create a custom search on PubMed for example, and get an RSS feed for that custom search directly into Zotero where you can interact with each relevant search result (read, add to your library and then tag, comment etc.).
@ClaireFromClare@nlb wow, I had no idea #Zotero had an integrated RSS reader! That might be exactly what I need… especially now that they have an Android version! Thanks both!
@elduvelle Feedly, although I’m looking for a replacement since it surfaced that they’re (explicitly and deliberately) aiding union-busting. Very annoyed since it was a pretty good browser plugin and app.
@elduvelle I now use Thunderbird for RSS, as well as for email, on Windows Mac & Linux. It helpfully suggests possible feed URLs from webpages which don't mention the possibility.
I'm delighted to rediscover #RSS & would like to know more about how to ensure websites are RSS-friendly... advice welcome!
@elduvelle a lot of journals have shut down their RSS feeds. I think your best bet for papers might be something like openalex, dimensions or (unfortunately) scopus, but i bet the librarians know better
@jonny oooh really? 😭 why have they shut them down? Is nobody using them anymore to follow the literature?
I can maybe do with #SemanticScholar but I would feel better with a less fancy (/“AI”) alternative. I’ll look into those things you mention. Thank you ☺️
@elduvelle take a look also at https://docs.rsshub.app/routes/journal, they are not all operational but at least they’ll tell you more or less which journals might expose the rss feed. But @jonny is right and most seems to do everything to prevent using rss. Springer still has its old search with the rss available, but the new one does not expose any rss to my knowledge (https://archaeo.social/@andreatitolo/111623386528276808) sorry for the self-reference
@elduvelle same reason that all the "enhanced PDF readers" exist despite everyone hating them and why all the paper metadata is technically uncopyrightable but bound by proprietary databases (and why openalex is necessary in the first place): gotta drive people onto the surveillance mediums. The papers that you read, how long you read them, what you click on, what you search for, etc. is extremely valuable "research intelligence" data that is actively and presently repackaged and sold as products like SciVal for eg. recommending maximally fundable topics to researchers and funding agencies, or to pharmaceutical agencies to poach the competition, etc. Semantic Scholar is "AI" in the sense that any natural language parsing algorithm is "AI," as far as I know it isn't part of the surveillance apparatus directly, although AI2 seems passively headed in that direction.
@elduvelle@jonny I use RSS feeds for some journals but they're mostly pretty crap. Sometimes just showing the title of the paper and no abstract. Sometimes (extraordinarily) just having an entry for each paper that doesn't even give the title, just the name of the journal. I suspect in these cases the journal may not even know it has an RSS feed it's just some default configuration in software that nobody understands. I've had a much better time just using semantic scholar to be honest.
@elduvelle@jonny fwiw I use feedly but it's on my to do list to switch to something else because apparently they've been up to no good (I've forgotten what exactly but I'm sure past-Dan had good reasons).
@neuralreckoning @elduvelle
This site says it is a big collection of #RSS feeds, but I cant actually figure out how to find the feed URLs. I used to use it when I was actually trying to keep up with the literature tho, so if its still running, even if you cant get RSS feed it still delivers you an email with a bunch of journal ToCs. https://www.journaltocs.ac.uk/index.php?action=login
Nowadays I would probably just want to write something that grabs the latest openalex snapshot and does some simple comparisons with my zotero library - find me works that cite things in my library, from authors I frequently read, take vector embeddings of abstracts using a language model, etc., Weight by the number of times I have read something/how many highlights I made.
In the absence of real organization, paper discovery is genuinely useful and necessary tooling to make, but unfortunately you just cant ever trust any recommendation algo as a service products.
@roaldarboel @neuralreckoning@elduvelle
Yeah there are RSS links for some of the journals, but not all, and their export link is broken. I know for sure that some of the journals they list there dont have RSS feeds, so they must be doing something else. Not to repeat myself too much but ya I think aggregators like openalex/crossref would be the way to go here
@roaldarboel @elduvelle
Should be just like an interface that lets you start typing a journal name, querying crossref for completions. When a journal is selected, create a feed for it by creating a new db table and adding it to a list of indexed servers. Query crossref daily to check for changes.
That sounds like a one evening programming challenge, im searching around rn if anyone has done it and if they dont ill give it a go tonight
@roaldarboel@elduvelle trying to pick up yet another framework so spent awhile wandering around FastAPI and SQLModel and HTMX, but we are now at the fun part where we are getting metadata and just need to make the feed model and add a routes endpoint. pausing for food https://github.com/sneakers-the-rat/journal-rss
@roaldarboel@elduvelle crossref identifies journals by ISSN in their API. not all journals have an ISSN - notably journals that have never published anything. most journals have two ISSNs - digital and print. sometimes those ISSNs are the same ISSN, sometimes they're not. metadata rocks.
@roaldarboel@elduvelle actually gonna call it for the night but ya basically just need to make a route that's /journals/{issn}/ that shows an individual journal feed, button to request/start a feed, populate papers from crossref, format into RSS, make daily task to refresh tracked journals, done! probably 2 more hours for core function and 2 for plausible ux
@jonny@elduvelle Jonny, please never change! This is the kind of adversarial interob the world needs more of! Would be amazing if it can be used to generate a list, either CSV or OPML, ready to import into your favourite RSS aggregator.
@roaldarboel@elduvelle crawling along bc i keep realizing i have only hours of precious holiday break left, but made a very low-rent roadmap in case ya wanna come play
@jonny@roaldarboel@elduvelle keyword filters? I'd love to have a feed of all the journals that might have papers relevant to me but with certain topics I know I'm not interested in removed. Would be a huge time saver.
@neuralreckoning@jonny@roaldarboel This! When I used to have RSS feeds, I think each feed was a sort of keyword-based query, not just all the papers from a given journal. That way any new content that appeared was potentially relevant (and if not I could refine the “query”). I have no idea how it worked, it was a long time ago…
@dstephenlindsay@elduvelle@roaldarboel not too concerned w/ that, making something that's self-deployable so ppl can make their own feeds if they want em, not trying to make a one-platform-to-rule-them-all :)
@jonny@elduvelle
I'm not sure what you mean about RSS feeds being bad? eLife has some great RSS feeds: https://elifesciences.org/alerts
Similarly for nature neuro ( https://www.nature.com/neuro/web-feeds ) or most journals. The trick is to look up "journal name rss" on your favorite search engine. Admittedly I only subscribe to the eLife ones, subscribing to science or nature anything is too much of a firehose for me.
You can follow any mastodon account with RSS.
For more broad science news, phys.org has some nice feeds that don't feel like firehoses: https://phys.org/feeds/
I follow a bunch of neuro blogs with RSS, but sadly most of them are defunct now... Still, I hope that we can come back to blogging!
@elduvelle If you can and want to self-host, I recommend Tiny Tiny RSS. Slick and fast web-gui and even multi-user. Most important (for me), is the nice Android App. https://tt-rss.org
I use RSS a lot. As others said: not every journal or website supports it (well). But a sufficient number do and that is enough for me. M more that many sources do not prominently link their feeds but you often find links in the HTML code... guess their own dev people add them for their own interest 😉
@elduvelle If you want up-to-the-minute announcements of new papers, then waiting until things are listed in PubMed indeed won't cut it for you.
I have been looking for better solutions to this issue myself - I will post any successes I come across.
@caiocgo do you mean Newsblur? I think I used to use that a looong time ago, and might just come back to it, although now that I learned that Zotero has an integrated RSS reader I might just use that instead. But it looks like I should also check out Flipboard (have you tried it? Do you prefer it to Newsblur?)
@elduvelle I don't know if this translate to your field. I receive an email with the title and abstract of all preprints submitted to arXiv cond-mat. In my field a lot of people would submit a preprint either at submission or after acceptance.
It's not all papers but gives an ideal idea.
(also most preprints are really close to the published version, so not a big deal if it hasn't peer-reviewed)
@CCochard that seems a bit overwhelming 👀 the nice thing with the RSS feed of a journal (hopefully this includes the preprint servers) is that - if I remember well - you can filter according to specific keywords!
@elduvelle that's what I thought too, but it's actually manageable. About 15-20 articles per day, just reading the titles take me 5 min or so.
ArXiv also has a rss feed of articles but I find that more overwhelming as there are loads and it's harder to filter through.
Honestly it's a time I like in my day, 5-10min with a cup of tea just chilling looking at what is being done in my field, what are the interests, what's picking up, etc.
@elduvelle I use Feedly. At one point for work we used The Old Reader, which had the same look as the Google Reader of old. I don't know if that still exists.
@elduvelle I still have aKregator installed, but I don't check it much. I know a lot of the feeds I had went offline, and some just became annoying to read in the application, because they didn't contain the article, but linked to an article, and Chrome and Firefox don't know how to open a link without stealing focus (but using Konqueror was an exercise in how broken the web can be.)
I'm just using the one that's built into #Vivaldi. It works and lets me customize how the text looks. My only gripe is that audio stops if the tab loses focus.
@EverydayMoggie, audio shouldn't stop when you switch tabs. 🤔 Could you check Settings > Tabs > Tab features > Mute Tab Audio and see if changing the setting there improves things.
@elduvelle i use YARR, its a barebones single exe aggregator i run on my blog server... then access it via browser from my devices. Its a bit abandonware but it beat the competitors as i could run it on a custom port.
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