RSS feeds for Journal Table of Contents
May 24th, 2006 by Karen
For a while, I’ve been using CiteULike to get RSS feeds of the table of contents of new journal issues. Its really useful for journals that CiteULike is able to index table of contents. However, there are several magazines/journals that aren’t available via CiteULike that I’d like to be able to keep a closer eye on more easily. Computers in Libraries, Information Technology and Libraries, and Library Journal to name a few. It would be nice to know if there is something in a particular issue of interest. By not providing this type of RSS feed the publisher is just making my life more difficult. There isn’t always something of interest in every issue and I don’t have time to individually look at publications or at tables of contents every month. So I typically don’t bother to look and check things out unless something is brought to my attention via another means (somebody blogs about it or mentions it to me). I keep hoping that the publishers will change their practices and just make RSS feeds of their tables of contents available via their websites. Particularly publishers who are providing RSS feeds of other content. Sigh, I suppose that I can only hope. That is unless somebody has another suggestion about to to see when a new issues are available and what is in those issues.
Important: If you have access to EBSCO’s online database, Academic Search Premier, you can use its “Journal Alert” feature to set up alerts of updates to tables of contents to journals such as Computers in Libraries, Information Technology and Libraries, and Library Journal. I have set up such emailed journal alerts for the latter two via my local public library’s online EBSCO. You might try doing so via your local public library too. EBSCO offers RSS feeds of the TOCs, as well. There are literally scores of journals that you can do this for in Academic Search Premier. The TOCs arrive regularly in my email inbox and I forward those alerts to interested patrons. You can save subject services and have the results forwarded to you via email, too. You have to set them up one by one, so forget about human interaction for the next month or so.
You are absolutely spot on about the backwardness of major publishers in terms of providing RSS feeds and/or email alerts of updates to tables of contents. Just tonight I have been toggling between PubMed, various publisher sites and Ovid–what a headache. Ugh.
It really is bizarre that the publisher of Computers in Libraries, Information Today, doesn’t seem to have RSS feeds of the TOC for that and of its other valuable publications. If it does, they are not readily discoverable on its web site:
http://www.infotoday.com/
Your best bet is Journal Alert in EBSCO. Way to go, EBSCO!
You might also try the journals database of PubMed. If you have a PubMed account (free, no strings attached) you can set up email alerts of dozens of journals—many of which are not strictly medical journals at all.
Also, you can set up email alerts of dozens of the Lippincott journals via this part of its site:
http://www.lwwonline.com/pt/re/lwwonline/home.htm;jsessionid=G19Hvy7xTCgJ3vZRpplhcxjL4Jtr9yBfBzCTTn1PwGctNP5SWr9Z!210985008!-949856144!8091!-1
It is slightly clunky and hard to find on the Lippincott site, but a few hours invested in setting up the alerts is well worth it, given that the alerts arrive with great regularity in one’s email inbox. (Some have come in as I been writing this note, for instance.)
The great laggard in the RSS TOC realm is (to no one’s surprise) Elsevier. I even wrote to Elsevier last week and was told that RSS feeds are not available yet (no rationale for this dismal state of affairs given). It seems to be Elsevier’s deliberate policy to retain its iron grip on its material, even to the extent of forcing current or potential subscribers to have to visit its very clunky web site every few months and crick through its dozens of offerings. No wonder librarians are getting ever more fed up with Elsevier.
Attention Elsevier stockholders: Elsevier is rapidly alienating most of the decision makers in the library world who rule on whether or not to subscribe to Elsevier journals. It is a basic service these days for publishers to offer RSS feeds of TOCs. It is not in the business interest of Elsevier to maintain such a blinkered, restrictive and ultimately self-defeating policy. Providing TOC information would garner subscribers and not result in leakage of its increasingly angry customer base—which is looking with an ever friendlier eye on the open access publishers like BioMed Central.
Finally, how I wish that the Library 2.0 crowd would cease some of its proselytizing and get together in a truly productive fashion with smart Web 2.0 types like Dave Winer, Marshall Kirkpatrick:
http://marshallk.com/
and Peter Cashmore:
http://mashable.com/
to somehow create some sort of OPML tool that would enable librarians to set up in blocks email alerts or RSS feeds of tables of contents of the many academic publishers. I would think that such thing is doable. I am no programmer, so maybe there are insurmountable obstacles at this point the creation of such a mashup. But it is absurd, saddening and infuriating that librarians throughout the world have to engage in the tedium of incrementally creating email alerts via a hodgepodge of not-for-profit and commercial databases and publisher web sites. Steven Cohen of Library stuff—could you lead the movement for the creation of some sort of central depot on the Internet for librarians to pop over to and set up RSS feeds of TOCs? The time is now. Hellllllp! We shouldn’t have to have to patch things together using FeedYes, Rmail and so forth.
Finally, the CiteULike listings appear not to be TOCs proper but merely listings of recent articles which, while helpful, are not TOCS as such.
Hope Leman
If the journal you are interested in does publish a table of contents online, you may be able to create your own RSS feed for the website. With services like http://www.feed43.com/ (I am not affiliated with them, just created some feeds for my own use) you can set up a feed for a site that doesn’t offer one. I never got around to writing a review of the service, but it works for a lot of pages. It can be a little daunting to set up though. There are also some desktop programs to create feeds for pages that don’t have their own.
One of the databases we have available at our library is Ebscohost which includes all three of the journals you listed. I created an account with Ebsco and set it up so that they email me an alert, including the table of contents with links to the actual articles, whenever a new issue is available online. I wouldn’t be suprised if other databases have similar features; our database selection is limited so I’m not sure. I realize that email is a little old-fashioned and not as Library 2.0 as RSS but it gets the job done. The only drawback to this system is that I think there is a slight delay (maybe a couple of weeks) between the time the journal is published and the time it is made available online.
As a demonstration of the power of RSS, take a look at uBio’s taxonomically intelligent RSS aggregator (http://www.ubio.org/index.php?pagename=ubioRSS). uBio aggregates RSS fields from numerous biological journals, and uses uBio’s database of names of organisms to organise this information (essentially, they classify items in RSS feeds using a biological taxonomy). Users can then subscribe to a RSS feed for their particular organisms of interest, where the content comes from different providers.
[...] As a former systems librarian, I first wanted to organize the content in a way that made sense to me. So you can browse the LJ news and Roy Tennant’s column. Ebsco subscribers can subscribe to a feed of LJ articles, too. [...]
[...] However, many journals don’t offer the RSS option. Elsevier don’t, for example. However, the situation is changing in recent times, with more journals allowing RSS accessing to TOC, e.g. Sage, which is obviously the right way to go. [...]
http://www.tictocs.ac.uk/
The aim of the ticTOCs project is to develop a freely available service which will transform journal current awareness by making it easy for academics and researchers to find, display, store, combine and reuse tables of contents from multiple publishers in a personalisable web based environment. JISC is the primary funder of the ticTOCs project, which will run for two years from April 2007.