Medical RSS Directories
Very shortly after I started thinking about RSS for clinical current awareness, I decided that I needed to create a searchable, well-organized directory of medical RSS feeds.
Then I found out that others had beaten me to it. Here’s a brief review of four directories of medical RSS feeds.
1. Medworm.com
Created by Frankie Dolan, a UK-based IT engineer with a physician in the family, Medworm is really, really cool.
- Medworm ISN’T just a searchable directory of feeds. The last time I asked Frankie about it, Medworm’s database tracked almost two thousand feeds, and kept the last 100 posts of each saved. You can use Medworm to actually search the last hundred posts of the approximately 2000 feeds it tracks.
- In addition to the feeds you might expect from core journals in medicine, Medworm also tracks feeds from professional and cosumer health news sources (MedScape and the like)
- Medworm also has pre-set searches by Medical Specialty, common Medical Conditions, as well as sections for Infectious Diseases, and Cancers.
- You can also sign up for a free account at Medworm, and manage all your subscriptions at the Medworm site and use its web-based aggregator to read your feeds’ content, use the My Clippings feature to save items for later, or quickly email the item to a colleague.
- Medworm has big plans for additional functionality to help clinicians manage their medical literature needs, but I can’t say much more than that for now.
2. Medical-feeds.com
I just became aware of medical-feeds.com today via RSSonate.
- The About page is light on details, but the site seems arranged by category and sub-category, mostly by medical specialty.
- One thing I really like about this site is how each feed in a sub-category has three links: View, XML, and Site. View is the content of the feed parsed by medical-feeds.com in your browser, XML is the link to the feed itself, and Site is the web page from which the feed URL was collected or the home page of the site that originates the feed.
3. The University of Helsinki’s FeedNavigator
With 1591 feed sources, FeedNavigator approaches the number of feeds in Medworm.com, and seems to significantly exceed the number of feeds at medical-feeds.com
- The navigation is a little awkward, but FeedNavigator lets you set up your own account, save selected feeds to MyFeeds, save selected articles to MyArticles, and export articles to RefWorks.
- While not especially useful to those of us who aren’t associated with The University of Helsinki, I love that these feeds have SFX links and links by which a user can submit an article to the library for document delivery. These are features that medical libraries would do well to note in designing their own RSS-related services.
4. National Library for Health (UK) - RSS Directory
The UK’s National Library for Health has started a searchable directory of Medical RSS feeds as well. Bless them, they have provided a good bit of information about their service on their About page.
- Inadequate or absent user documentation is one of my constant gripes, so I cannot possibly say too much about how great the user help documentation on this site is:
- The Browse for feeds page shows few categories and not a lot of feeds populating this database yet, but the clean, useable design of this site has me excited about it. I can’t wait to see what it is like when its database of feeds is larger.
If you know of any other directories for medical RSS feeds or if you’ve used any of the four services noted above, please leave a note in the comments and share your views!
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