How To: Create an RSS Feed for a Feedless Journal with PubMed
A few emails have indicated that some specific clarification on how to create an RSS feed in PubMed for a medical journal that does not offer its own feed would be helpful. Here goes:
We’ll start by paying a visit to our much-beloved PubMed, and clicking on the Limits tab.
Click on Add Journal
Type in the name (or partial name and click to select the name) of the journal you need a feed for. For our example, we’ll use American Heart Journal, which, as has previously been noted, Elsevier does not provide an RSS feed for.
Scroll down to the bottom of the page and click Go
We’re back to the main search page of PubMed now, and we can see that this GUI has formulated a search string.
(Don’t worry about the fact that there are 19,635 results of this search- we’ll limit the number you’ll get via RSS in the feed options.)
Next, go to the Send To drop-down menu and select RSS Feed
On the next screen, choose to Limit items if more than 50. Why 50? Because the July issue had 40 indexed items. Also, give the feed a sensible name, like American Heart Journal, and click the Create Feed button.
All that’s left to do is collect the URL of the feed. You can do this by clicking on the orange XML button and copying the URL from the new tab or window that appears, or you can right-click on the orange XML button and click Copy Link Location (or subscribe to it in the manner prescribed by your aggregator, browser plug-in(s), yadda-yadda-yadda).
That’s it. You now have a feed for the journal. I tested last week to see how much time elapsed between publish date of an issue and the journal’s articles being indexed and searchable via PubMed. It took about a business day.
Questions? Let me know. 
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July 19th, 2006 at 9:22 am
David,
Kudos! Thanks for the delay test.
I queried the nice folks at PubMed months ago on this very subject and they were kind enough to give me directions not unlike yours.
I know you find the use of myriad readers to be a less than optimal way of working. Still, I must recommend Opera and its integrated reader. Opera’s configurability is well nigh incredible and it is standards compliant to boot. It makes RSS really simple, see? Oh, and to those new to the alternative browser world, it is free. I like all the browsers out there, even IE, but I could never be without Opera.
July 19th, 2006 at 9:33 am
Hi Mr. Schad! (Please forgive the formality of addressing you by your surname, done only to prevent potential confusion about who is addressing whom.)
I have absolutely nothing against using browser-based readers, be they in IE7, Firefox, Flock, or Opera. I don’t use them myself because I want to have the same interface at work as I have at home, and security policies at my place of employment prevent me from using any browser other than IE.
Also, I think it is important to let them know which ones I know well, so that they can consider the likely level of support from my library when they choose their own reader.
Mr. Schad, might you be willing to send me the instructions that PubMed sent to you so that I can compare them to mine and make sure I didn’t miss something that they covered?
Thanks for writing!
July 19th, 2006 at 9:43 am
Sorry, poor writing. I wrote:
“Also, I think it is important to let them know which ones I know well…”,
To clarify: “them”=”users.”
Sorry for the confusion.
July 19th, 2006 at 10:14 am
Thanks this was very illuminating. I had been using FeedYes and other services to scrape content out. This makes my life a great deal easier.
July 19th, 2006 at 2:46 pm
Well you got me on this one, David, I have somehow misplaced the e mail. We have an old, virtually unsearchable e mail system here. Sorry.
We only have one supported browser here, guess which one. The powers that be have magnanimously deigned to allow me (and I assume others) to use other browsers until they muck up the network. I’m not worried.
I rarely promote, but Opera is worth a try; when the procrustean policy makers relent, I mean. The next iteration of IE will have some type of RSS integration, but I still think it’s polishing poop.
July 28th, 2006 at 7:12 pm
[...] Then follow the instructions on generating a feed that were detailed in this previous post. [...]
October 11th, 2006 at 9:22 pm
[...] How To: Create an RSS Feed for a Feedless Journal with PubMed – davidrothman.net » Blog Archive (tags: rss PubMed journal tutorial database) [...]
August 9th, 2007 at 9:31 am
I’ve used feed43.com for a few journals/sites:
http://www.feed43.com/ann-intern-med.xml
http://www.feed43.com/attract.xml
Martin
August 28th, 2008 at 9:36 pm
[...] How To: Create an RSS Feed for a Feedless Journal with PubMed [...]