A while ago, Paul blogged on The Winch about Electronic Journals A-to-Z linking to the tables of contents of over 5000 journals, most of which are available as RSS feeds. Here’s the rest of Paul’s post to explain how this can help you keep track of relevant new articles if you’re a researcher:

You can subscribe for updates on a particular journal using an RSS feed reader (such as Google Reader), and see easily when new articles are published in that journal.

You’ll be able to spot them as you search the A-to-Z: they’re marked with the standard, orange RSS icon: 

To pick an example at random: the record for the American journal of agricultural economics (issn:0002-9092) looks like this on the A-to-Z:

Clicking on the link opens a page containing the “raw” RSS feed:

But if I paste the address (URL) of that “raw” page into my feed reader (I happen to use Google Reader), I can continue to follow the updated TOCs for that journal, along with any other RSS feeds I’m following, every time I log in:

We’ve added these feeds to the Electronic Journals A-to-Z using information from the JISC ticTOCs service (an incredibly useful directory of RSS-format journal TOCs, available at: www.tictocs.ac.uk) –  after they were asked, and agreed to ‘open the box‘ on their data – by making it available in a format which is compatible (after a bit of light hammering!) with the A-to-Z.

To find out more about the benefits of using RSS to stay up to date with the latest research news, come along to one of our Working Smarter with the Web sessions.