A few months ago, a colleague and I discovered a certain database (which I shan’t name because I’ve forgotten which it was) had RSS alerts, but try as we might we couldn’t get them to work on Google Reader.
I got curious again recently – and more importantly I got time – so I sat down with a list of engineering databases and started checking them one at a time to see what kinds of search alerts they each had. My results so far:
Compendex
- weekly
- search alerts
- by email or RSS
ScienceDirect
- daily, weekly, or monthly
- search alerts, topic alerts, contents alerts, and citation alerts
- by email or RSS – but the RSS link has to be manually edited if you’re using the database through a proxy server
Scopus
- daily, weekly, or monthly
- search alerts and citation alerts
- by email or RSS – but the RSS link has to be edited as above
Web of Science
- weekly or monthly
- search alerts, contents alerts, and citation alerts
- by email or RSS – but the RSS link has to be edited
Standards New Zealand
- when a standard is updated
- email only
What’s this manual editing I’m talking about? Well, the typical rss feed from these databases looks approximately like: http://database.com.proxy.myinstitution.ac.nz/rss/lotsofgobbledygook
The proxy.myinstitution.ac.nz stuff allows me to access a database from anywhere in the world – but it requires me to authenticate when I do. Google Reader, obviously, doesn’t know my login details, so when it tries to follow that link it fails. (Sometimes it tells me it’s failed – “no feed found” – and sometimes it tells me it’s subscribed but there’s nothing on the feed itself.)
If I delete the proxy.myinstitution.ac.nz gunk, Google Reader subscribes quite happily and shows me everything on the feed. But I shouldn’t have to delete the stuff manually – the database should give me the correct feed url to start with. As Compendex does.