RSS and journals

When setting up our smallworlds project and the course content for key skills undergraduate course, we struggled to find good sources of customisable RSS searches in peer reviewed journals. In the course of searching for something else, I stumbled across a solution today, the JISC project ticTOC.

ticTOC

ticTOC allows you to search for journals by journal name or publisher, then add them to a list ‘myTOC’.

The table of contents for these journals can then be exported as a OPML file for an RSS reader. Very simple and easy to do.

TOCs RSS in Google Reader

I would like to be able to take this one stage further and add search terms but, it is a step in the right direction.

Of course, I put it on twitter and then got another suggestion for something similar (thanks twitterverse!), myjournals. Tools like these are the workhorses that we need to encourage more scientists into the web2.0 world. Current awareness is the bread and butter of science, if we can make it obvious that RSS can turn your bread and butter into a cheese toasty we are laughing!

update: general Search added December 2008.