Life of a Lab Rat

I have a confession to make.

My name is Black Knight, and I am an RSS junkie. Ever since most of the journals started using RSS instead of email alerts (there are a couple of honorableannoying exceptions) —

the strangest thing has just happened. I was in the process of checking my facts (I was going to say, Company of Biologists, I'm looking at you) when I stumbled across an RSS aggregator with the rather unsavoury moniker BaRF. And this site aggregates new publications from what looks like most of the journals that are relevant to my research, and provides handy bite-sized RSS feeds (via PubMed, it would appear).

Yes, it is useful to have certain search terms as an RSS feed within PubMed but that is no substitute for at least skimming the titles of articles in each new journal issue. BaRF has just made this a whole lot easier.

Anyway, the point is that I have not seen the inside of a library for months, if not years (I don't think I even know where the USyd library is, in real space at least), but I am more up-to-date with the literature than ever before. Which I suppose is a good thing.

The problem I face is two-fold. The first is that the DOI records do not always keep up with the RSS feeds from the journals. Nature is particularly bad in this respect. I suppose the problem is worse down here in the Antipodes because I get RSS pings late Wednesday night European time, and the journal is not actually published until Thursday. So, Thursday morning Ocker time I get lots of nice, orange titles but an equivalent number of broken DOIs. Unless I wait until about midday, it seems.

The second part of the problem is advance online publication (AOP). This is the publication of papers on the journal's website in an (editorially & peer-review) accepted but not necessarily sub-edited or pasted-up form, ahead of publication in print. This means that I get to read papers before they appear in print.

And the problem there is that when they do appear in print they come up a second time on the RSS, which means I sit there going 'huh? I've read this already. Give me something new!'.

Classic addiction symptoms. There should be a support group — I am sure that I am not the only one suffering from this habit. If there is such a group, perhaps it should not have an RSS feed.