RSS Feeds for Scholarship
| What are they? Why use them? Examples of RSS Readers How to Find RSS Feeds Filtering RSS Feeds Create an RSS Feed Send an RSS Feed to Email |
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I. What are they?
- RSS = Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary.
- Each time the feed is updated (i.e., new articles are published in the journal), the results will be displayed in the feed.
- Keep up with current scholarship by receiving information from your favorite websites in one place--an RSS reader--so that you don't have to check each site for updates.
- Major news sources, many academic journals, blogs -- have RSS feeds.
- See video RSS in Plain English
(the above is taken from Keeping Up With Current Scholarship by the University of Virginia Library. )
II. Why Use RSS?
Why would RSS be better than SmartCILP, Westlaw/Lexis Alerts, Email from SSRN or Washington & Lee Current Law Journal Content etc.?
- Lexis and Westlaw do not have all journals on them, and may have a delay.
- While SmartCILP includes many journals, you may want to add work-in-progress articles from SSRN, news articles, etc.
- Better than email because puts all in one place. Look at it when you want to.
- RSS feeds and many readers are free.
- Term specific filtering? Can do with Lexis, Westlaw, Washington & Lee, also with RSS.
III. RSS Readers 
- Bloglines (Free and easy to use, used by the law library staff)
- RSS Reader on Thunderbird Email -
- To set up, From the Main Thunderbird window,
- go to File -> New -> Account
- Select "RSS News & Blogs"
- Follow the instructions on screen - Feeds appear underneath the email folders, in the News and Blogs headings
- To add more feeds, click on News & Blogs heading>Manage Subscriptions, add new feeds to the
appropriate folder. Find the xml for the feed by clicking on the xml icon, or a subscribe icon - Create filters - News & Blogs>Advanced Features>Manage Message Filters. Send items containing certain words to a new folder, or flag them.
- On your home computer, download Thunderbird (its free) to use the RSS reader)
- To set up, From the Main Thunderbird window,
- Top 5 Online RSS Readers
IV Finding RSS feeds
A. RSS Feeds of Scholarly Journals
Washington and Lee Current Law Journal Content - Instead of receiving emails, set up RSS feeds of particular journals or a term search. Term searches can be in a specific field, such as author or title. Sends citations and links to full text from other sources. See instructions.- Many individual law journals have RSS feeds available. Some of which are full text, some are table of contents only. For a list, see SMULaw, RSS - Law Journals. Two examples of full text RSS Feeds: Harvard Law Review; Houston Law Review.
- SSRN - RSS Feeds for each author. From the author's homepage, look for the XML icon. See Instructions.
B. RSS Feeds of Court Cases
- Many at Findlaw
- Ohio Supreme Court RSS Feeds - one for cases and another for court news
C. Blogs
- See Cleveland Marshall's Legal Research on the Web>Reference>Legal Blogs for directories and search engines.
V. Filtering 
- Yahoo Pipes, Feedrinse can restrict the number of posts you receive from a particular feed to only posts containing certain terms. For more information on filtering see the library's blog post, RSS Feed Lists News CSU Library Books.
- Feed Sifter is an even easier alternative
- Thunderbird RSS feed also has filters. See above
VI. Creating an RSS Feed
Create an RSS feed out of any website by using:
- Page 2 RSS - Easy - just type in the url.
- Feed43 - requires knowledge of html and ability to manipulate code on the page in question
- Others
VII. Sending an RSS feed to Email Inbox
Use Feedburner (used on CM Library blog), Feedblitz or similar service. Many blogs will have buttons to subscribe to the blog via email.
links checked 9/09 (aeb)