Finding the Best RSS Service for Journal Table of Contents
I don't know how long I have been on this quest. I have been trying to find one easy site to direct patrons to so they could get the RSS feeds to various journals' table of contents.
I am looking for one site. Patrons do not need to be going to various individual journal publisher sites and subscribing to TOC feeds. It is time consuming and the library may subscribe to that journal from another vendor other than the publisher such as MDConsult or Ebsco full text databases.
I looked at PubMed. It is clunky. You have to set up a TOC RSS feed like you are creating a PubMed search. You create a search for just the journal and limit it to this year. Your first search to create the feed always brings up a ton of results. At the end of the year you have to adjust the limit for the upcoming year. Finally, you wouldn't get the full table of contents for a journal that is selectively indexed within PubMed.
I looked at Ovid. It is less clunky than PubMed, despite the fact there is no search for journal box in their Journals database and you have to scroll through the A-Z list of journals to get to the correct one. The problem with Ovid is that you are asked to create a login to save the RSS feed. Very annoying. Why would somebody want to save a table of contents search as a "saved search" anyway, can't it just generate the RSS feed without the need to save the search? Our library allows anybody to save a search without a creating a password, so they can create an RSS feed and it is saved. However, these searches are periodically automatically deleted. What happens to the feed when that happens?
I have yet to look at Ebsco's databases. I guess that is my next project.
Am I making a mountain out of a mole hill? Is it too much to ask for one site that has (at least) all of the journals index in Medline and I can use it to easily create table of contents feeds that link to the library's LinkSource (or ArticleLinker) product. When I go to Bloglines I can see the TOC and click on the title to get the full text of the article or request the article through ILL.
Why do I bother with RSS feeds when I could have TOC's emailed? Emailed TOC's would be groovy. But I don't know of a single site that will email the TOC's with full text links. Additionally, we have noticed that our hospital spam filters have been known to eat TOC emails.
Anybody have any ideas am I missing something? It wouldn't be the first time and I would love to hear other thoughts.
posted by The Krafty Librarian @ 5:33 PM
10 comments
10 Comments:
Ovid SP has 'em on the Journals page.
A project of interest is ticTOCs
http://www.tictocs.ac.uk/
You can see the general idea in a brief slideshow on their blog
http://tictocsnews.wordpress.com/
Two year project started in April 2007 so may be a little while till we have the fruits.
Actually, there is no need to date limit a saved search. Simply do a search for one or more journal titles and then run the search, click save, and set your timing. That's it. Yes, the first retrieval will net all citations. After that, though, it will be items new to the database since the last time the search was run.
There's a nice little tutorial on this available via the "Tutorials" link on the blue side bar in PubMed.
You are right, though, about the fact that this will only get the citations that are a part of the database. If a journal is selectively indexed, that's all you'll get.
Donna,
Still that isn't a true table of contents service. It is a work around and not a very good one if people are not getting the complete table of contents and merely getting the latest updates which could includ epubs ahead of print (not in that issue's toc).
Journal TOC feeds collected, categorized, and bundled http://ebling.library.wisc.edu/rss/index.cfm
A good tip is like anonymous already wrote: http://ebling.library.wisc.edu/rss/index.cfm but not only on category. There is als a tab with an alphabetic listing.
In Ulrich's periodicals directory you will find RSS feeds as well on the full record level.
http://www.ulrichsweb.com/ulrichsweb
But you need a license.
This service from Ebling is good but, as far as I can tell, you have to have proxy access to Ebling. We have TofC from our journal aggregator SWETS that is sometimes full text so yes, yet another imperfect solution. I agree that this should be something we should be able to do and no you are not making a mountain out of a molehill.
I'll take back what I said there - I just tried the alphabetical listing and it worked.
OVIDSP has RSS on Your Journals@Ovid - then choose Browse Contents:Your Journals@Ovid...but has anyone tried them? I tried to grab mine but when I clicked on the RSS, my computer tried to open a file. The file never opened, so I called Ovid tech support because I thought maybe our hosp IT had implemented some filtering software that was blocking me, but the tech tried it and also had the same problem. For now, their solution was to right click on the current TOC feed, go to properties, then copy and paste the link. Hopefully, they will fix it so it works correctly.
ticTOCs is now available as a functioning service. It provides RSS feeds for over 11,000 scholarly journals.
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