Keeping Track of Research using Netvibes and RSS Feeds

In the olden days, professors subscribe to a journal, maybe five, or even ten, to keep up with his field. And when you visit the older professors, you will always find volumes of American Economic Review (AER) lining the shelves back to the 70s. If your professor is really really old, maybe the whole shelf is filled will them going back to 1911. There are more information now, and more people are writing paper. While it is always good to read papers from journals, it is also necessary to keep tabs on what other people are now doing since journals lag from working paper to publication. With everyone and their grandmothers now putting their research papers up on the web, and maybe even twittering about what they are working on, how would you sort the information out efficiently?

I have been experimenting with different ways to consume information, whether it be tracking what other economists are working on to what episodes of The Office are now available on Hulu. I do this with Netvibes and RSS feeds. For economics, I use feeds from RePEc, Ingenta Connect, and Atypon Link.

Here is a snapshot of Netvibes page, which allows me to know what articles are in the current issue of AER and Journal of Finance, what new working papers are in the fields I'm interested in, and what new posts are in the blogs I follow.

Now, more details on Netvibes and RSS feeds.

What is a RSS feed? Some websites have information that are updated frequently. A RSS feed lists this information, say current articles on a blog, in a consistent format so that an RSS reader can take the feed and show them together in a more organized manner. For example, the reader can aggregate information from different sources and show them on one webpage. Netvibes is an example of such a RSS reader. Other comparable products include the Google Reader and My Yahoo. Firefox itself can also be used as a RSS reader.

To track economic research, I have feeds giving me the papers in the latest AER and Journal of Finance, as well as feeds from various fields of RePEc's new economics papers report. Ingenta Connect has a really nice set of RSS feeds providing the table of content to the latest issues of many publications. Note, however, that unless your school has an electronic subscription from Ingenta, you will not be able to actually access these articles. Nonetheless, as alluded to before, since even grandmothers put their papers online, it is not too difficult to find a copy of the paper once you have the title - whether it be a copy put online by the authors, or an electronic version available from some other subscription that your school's library does have. My school only gets 1-year-old copies of Journal of finance, but does have electronic subscription to the most recent issue of AER. Thus, the feed I actually use are that of Atypon Link's RSS feed for AER. You can find out from your librarian whether you get the journal access online, and see if the data source offers RSS feeds. Now, to keep tab with more recent developments, I use RePEc's RSS feeds, which has updates of recent working papers in many fields. The full listing of fields is here.

With this setup, when I check whether Hulu has posted a new episode of The Office, I cannot help but also see what recent papers are in the AER and Journal of Finance, and what the new working papers are in my research fields.