Getting up-to-date with scientific discoveries is important and is one of the basic skills for scientists. There is a number of ways to do this. The two-most-common practices are to subscribe to electronic table of contents (e-toc) delivered to email and the second is to use RSS Feed reader. The latter is more practical and robust compared to the former. I believe some of you are already using this tool to retreive news or articles throughout the web, but for you who are new to this, this tool might be useful.

Basically, what RSS Feeds do is to retreive information from publishers that publish or broadcast feeds, in other words, they are the receiver, the so-called reader or aggregator. There is also a number of ways to use this tool. Some web browsers include this feature by default, such as Mozilla Firefox. We can also use email client such as Mozilla Thunderbird. There are also plenty of stand-alone programs that are dedicated exclusively to manage RSS Feed, such as FeedReader. If you don’t want to bother using those mentioned above for some reasons, web-based reader is also a great way to do this. There is no such ‘the best’ way on this, it is solely personal choice to choose which one that suits you. Here, as an example, I will give a brief ‘how to do’ description of getting feeds by using Google Reader. I chose this because it is very simple yet powerful and stable, and most importantly, you do not need to install anything, all you need is a web browser. However, you need to have an active account in Google.

First of all, you need to define which publishers/web contents that you need for your research. As an example, I will use Nature Publishing Group (NPG) as a feed source.

The following are the step-by-step of getting news feeds:

1. Go to NPG website: http://www.nature.com/
2. Open your Google Reader (you need to log in to your account)
3. Open the link for Web Feeds in the Nature website
4. Nature provides plenty of feeds option, for instance, I will subscribe to Nature-Issue (the top one)
5. Open the link (Nature-Issue), and it will give you an option of how to subscribe
6. On the pull-down menu, choose Google, and click subscribe now
7. You will be prompted to choose to add subscription to be added to your Google home page or to Google Reader, choose Google Reader (again, this is personal preference)
8. You are now subscribed to the Nature-Issue feeds. You must see the contents of the feeds immediately in your Google Reader
9. You can manage where you want to put your Nature subscription in the Google Reader folder. For example, if you want to put it in ‘Journals’ folder, click ’settings’ on top right corner of Google Reader, choose manage subscription. Find your subscription, next to it (at the right panel), click the ‘change folder’ pull-down menu and choose ‘new folder’. Type ‘Journals’. Your subscription is then automatically moved to your new ‘Journals’ folder.
10. There is another way of doing it. Once you found the RSS link that you are looking for, click on that link and copy the link, paste it into ‘Add subscription’ toolbar in Google Reader.
11. All done and enjoy browsing

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