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RSS feed alerts

Many publishers and databases provide RSS feeds to alert you to new issues or content. To subscribe to feeds, install RSS feed reader software, or use an online source like Google Reader. Look for the RSS icon rss or a link labeled with rss. Right-click the icon or link and copy the linked address. This address typically ends with rss or xml, but may not. You will paste or import this address (URL) into your feed reader software to subscribe to the feed. The software will regularly check for updates to the feed and will alert you to any changes.

For instance, a table of contents feed would be updated to entries from the latest issue of a journal whenever that journal is published online. Your feed reader would list the articles from that latest issue, and each entry would link to the article at the publisher's site. (Note that publisher's site may not be where the Virginia Tech Libraries has access to that article.)

  • BioOne RSS feeds

    BioOne offers RSS feeds for newly published journals' table of contents.

  • Cambridge journals RSS feeds

    Cambridge offers RSS and Atom feeds for table of contents from each of their journals. You can browse a complete list of titles or search for titles. You can choose from a feed of the current issue's table of contents or a feed of forthcoming articles that have been accepted for publication but not yet published. Copy the feed address and paste or import that URL into your feed reader software.

  • Emerald RSS feeds

    Emerald provides RSS feeds listing the new Table of Contents for their journals. The feeds are updated every seven days. Remember that the journals are updated at different frequencies and it is quite normal for no content to be added to a particular journal for some weeks. However, by subscribing to the feed you will be notified immediately once the content has been made available by Emerald.

  • IEEE Xplore RSS feeds

    IEEE Xplore offers a number of RSS feeds for their content. From the Journals & Magazines tab, you can subscribe to table of content feeds for many of their publications. From the Conferences tab, you can subscribe to a feed of newly added conference proceedings. From the two Standards tabs, you can subscribe to feeds for industry standards.

  • Informaworld RSS feeds

    You can subscribe to Table of Contents feeds for journals or subject grouping of journals from Informaworld.

  • ingenta RSS Feeds

    You can subscribe to RSS feeds for Table of Contents from newly published issues of journals in the ingenta database. You do not need an account at ingenta to subscribe to journal feeds.

  • Journal TOCs from JISC

    Journal TOCS allows searching the latest Table of Contents (TOCs) of over 12,000 journals collected from over 400 publishers. More journals are added continuously.

    You can start by searching for TOCs by journal title or by keywords. You also can browse TOCs by publisher or by subject. Then, if you click on a journal title, the latest Table of Contents will be displayed.

    Additionally, you can select journal TOCs and save them in your MyTOCs folder (with a "tick" tick). From there you can read your favourite TOCs at your convenience, or export them as an OPML file into your favourite feed reader. Please Register to ensure your MyTOCs are permanently saved.

  • MetaPress RSS feeds

    MetaPress provides RSS feeds for searches that update whenever new content matching the search criteria is added to the MetaPress database. You can also subscribe to Table of Contents feeds for journals hosted by MetaPress.

  • Sage RSS feeds

    You can subscribe to RSS feeds for the Table of Contents of Sage Publications, Sage Science Press, and Corwin Press journals that are updated whenever new issues are added to the database.

  • ScienceDirect RSS feeds

    You can subscribe to ScienceDirect RSS feeds for searches, journal table of contents, and citations to articles that have cited a specified article.

  • Springer RSS feeds

    You can subscribe to RSS feeds for searches and journal table of contents in SpringerLink.

  • TicTOCs

    TicTOCs is a service that has located RSS feeds for thousands of journals. Simply search or browse for journal(s) of interest and subscribe to the feed. The Virginia Tech Libraries  have used TicTOCs data to add RSS feed links to Addison. Simply search for journal(s) of interest in the catalog. If a match is found in the TicTOCs data, a feed link will appear in the External Contents box for that journal's record. You can also preview the first five entries of the feed to determine its usefulness to you.

  • Wiley RSS feeds

    Wiley InterScience offers RSS feeds for table of contents for their published journals.


Accessing content from RSS feeds

Most RSS feeds will not work through Off Campus Sign In; the links to articles and other content they provide will likely not work from off campus. The easiest way to resolve this is to install the LibX browser plugin.Once installed, you can right-click on an article page and choose to reload that page through Off Campus Sign In so you'll be recognized as a Virginia Tech user.

Any alerting service could include a citation to an article that is accessible from a different source than the feed provides or is not part of any Virginia Tech Libraries subscription. Use the Citation Linker to lookup if the article is available elsewhere (enter just the DOI digital object identifier if the feed lists it) or to get a link to request the article through interlibrary loan.