A number of people have been asking about how to set up Google Reader to keep track of publications. There are a number of things that I do and instead of emailing everyone separately about it, figured that maybe others would benefit if I just put up a little tutorial.
To use google reader you do need a google/gmail account. That's step 1 in the whole process. The remainder of this post assumes that you are using google reader, but presumably you can use other products to consolidate various RSS feeds.
1. Adding journals and their table of contents
In google reader you want to select Add a subscription in the upper left hand corner and then enter the name of the journal (example below)
In this example I searched for American Journal of Epidemiology (AJE)and got this result:
Since I already subscribed to AJE it shows me as subscribed. But, if I hadn't, then it would look like the third option with a subscribe option. You would simply click on this and it would add it to your feeds.
2. Adding PubMed searches as feeds
First you have to do a search in PubMed. For instance, here I search for Vitamin D:
At the top and bottom of the search results page (this is just from the first page) you find options for saving, storing, and sending your search results. In the last of the options you can select RSS feed from the pull down menu (shown here at the bottom of the first page of results):
Which then takes you to this screen:
After you decide on how much to limit the feed, Select "Create Feed"
You will then be instructed to click the XML icon and to copy the url from the address bar to the new page. Then using that url you simply click the Add a Subscription button at the top of the Google Reader (as we show in the first example) and paste in the url. You will then see the PubMed search saved among your subscriptions along the left-hand side of the reader screen:
