Introduction: what is RSS & how to use it

Follow MIT RSS feeds

Find academic RSS feeds & alerts

Publishers will often have a page listing RSS feeds or email alerts for all of their journals:

• ACS
• AMS
• APA
• APS
• Biomed Central Journals
• IEEE (click on the journal title and find the RSS alerts button)
• IoP
• MRS
• Nature Journals
• Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
• Project Muse
• RSC
• Science
• And many more: journal home pages will often have a link to feeds or email alerts for the tables of contents.  Use Vera to find individual journals you are interested in.

Search these databases to find literature on your topic in journals, conferences, etc. You can save the search as an RSS feed or an email alert and have any new items that match your search appear in your reader.

Steps for subscribing to alerts vary in different databases. To subscribe, look for links or buttons labeled "Search History/Alerts" or "Create an Alert," or find the RSS icon. Some websites don't display these links until you've already run a search.

Ask us if you have questions.

EBSCO - info about EBSCO alerts

• Business Source Complete
• Econlit

Engineering Village - go to Support > Help > "Saved searches and email alerts" for instructions

• Compendex - engineering
• Inspec - electrical engineering, physics, computer science, IT
• NTIS - US government-sponsored research reports & studies

Google Scholar - see Google Scholar Search Tips: Email Alerts

ISI Web of Knowledge - set up "Saved Searches or Alerts" in "My Tools"

ProQuest - set up alerts in "My Research"

PubMed - set up alerts in "My NCBI"

ScienceDirect - journals published by Elsevier, Pergamon, and North Holland; set up alerts by signing in

And more: use our Research Guides to find databases that cover your subject area

CiteULike: web site where academics (individuals or groups) can share papers, books, etc. they are reading; get feeds for new items added by individuals, groups or by topic

Patents:

• patents.com: query-based, look for feed on search results page
• freepatentsonline.com: pre-set feeds
• Google Patents: query-based (but Google Patents is not updated very frequently)

Most online journals and databases require an MIT IP address or MIT web certificates to get access.

This can cause problems for accessing RSS feeds from these resources when off-campus. You usually can get the titles/headlines and abstracts, but if you try to go to the full text the publisher will not recognize you. To work around this problem:

1. Get an MIT IP address while off-campus: Use VPN, which is software supported by IS&T that makes your computer act as if it is on campus.
2. Add a proxy string to the URL of the story you are trying to access, which will route you through the Libraries' proxy server and invoke your MIT web certificates. See: Connect from on and off-campus: Manually insert the proxy string.

Problems or questions? Ask us.