Thursday, July 5, 2007

How to track research developments using syndication and an RSS reader

One of the ways I track research developments is by using an advanced feature of the National Library of Medicine's PubMed database and Google Reader.*

For example, here is a PubMed RSS feed for "fibrocyte disorder" [1]. If you right click on the link to the left, copy and paste it into a feed reader, you'd see a feed.

Here's what I did:
  1. Go to PubMed. (National Library of Medicine, once upon a time a similar product was called 'Grateful Med'. Those were the days.)
  2. Enter your search string (ex. "fibrocyte disorder" and hit enter.
  3. Now, look carefully atop the results for a drop down "button" called "Send To".
  4. Click on "Send To" and choose "RSS Feed".
  5. Now look for the XML icon and copy the link. Paste into Google Reader.
Here's another one, for example, for Peyronie's Disease. It's easy to create as many as you'd like, and the searches can be much more sophisticated than the simple examples above.

One feature of Google Reader is that you can select interesting articles and share those in turn. The page that one uses to share those can be viewed by a web browser, but it also has a feed. Here's the page, which I'll add to over time:
Incidentally, my standing search on Google News also provides RSS syndication, so I'm including that in my Google Groups Peyronie's collection and items I note of interest will be on the shared articles page too. (Actually, at the moment that service appears to be broken ...)
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* A discussion of syndication clients is more than I want to get into. Bloglines and Google Reader are two web based clients, Firefox, IE 7 and Safari have reasonably good built-in readers, and their are several good dedicated readers for OS X and one good reader for XP (Onfolio).

[1] One of the ideas I'm exploring is that Peyronie's Disease is really a systemic fibrocyte disorder that manifests as penile deformation because of the unique vascular structure of the tunica albuginea. If so it should have a relationship to other disorders of fibrocyte function...

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