Efficient Academic

Scientific writing,software,presentation and more..

Google Reader for Academics

with 3 comments

I have written previously about how RSS is a revolutionary phenomenon for people who need to process continously updating information sources.If you are in Academia then keeping yourself updated in research publications is a must.Most people including myself used the eTOC (electronic Table of Contents) facility of journals to update what’s getting published.However after RSS came up all that has changed.I have a screencast showing how advantageous it is to go through large list of information with RSS feeds and the mightly google reader ;-)

More to Reader:

  • great interface
  • handy keyboard shortcuts
  • Google gears (access RSS feeds offline too!!)
  • Share posts from your RSS subscriptions

So give it a try you’ll notice that its much faster than the classical email subscription system :-)

PS: In screencast i show how the feeds can be organized in reader, then quickly ’skimmed’ using the trusty keyboard shortcuts, i usually mark (star) papers/posts that i want to read for later – i also share interesting papers via my shared feed which my friends can view, this way the chances of missingĀ  significant publication very less. Also have subscriptions from my Pubmed searches, from social bookmarking sites like connotea, citeulike etc. again a method to really get everything you are interested in. Yes this will result in a huge inflow of information, which is why i need an interface like Googlereader to go through them in the shortest time possible.

Written by bala

August 13, 2007 at 1:15 pm

3 Responses

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  1. Nice screen cast. I wish this was out a week ago, I just wrote a post on setting up and using Google Reader for keeping up with the journals in the context of philosophy and bioethics:
    Google Reader as a means of keeping up with journals, news, blogs and anything else

    Still, I do intend to do an advanced user post at some stage, I will have to link to this post.

    David Hunter

    August 13, 2007 at 7:00 pm

  2. The main problem I see with RSS feeds is that a lot of journals don’t have feeds for their early publication content (cf. Cell). So, it’s the email subscription for me there.

    such.ire

    August 14, 2007 at 3:39 am

  3. Yes, not all journals are completely supporting RSS, but that’s just a matter of time ;-) .Thanks David for the comment, your post pretty comprehensive – definitely helpful for people beginning with Reader.Looking forward to your post.

    bala

    August 15, 2007 at 8:29 am


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