Adaptively following the scientific literature, Hersh K. Bhargava:

Essentially all life science literature is indexed on PubMed (even preprints now). PubMed actually supports creating RSS feeds for arbitrary searches. However, creating queries by hand is very time consuming (imagine you have numerous keywords/authors), and any modification requires manual regeneration of the RSS link. Cue a small tool I built to solve this problem: Pubmed-Sieve (GitHub). It takes a Google Sheet (example) specifying a list of authors and/or keywords and/or journals and outputs 1) a PubMed search string and 2) a PubMed RSS Feed link for that search, ready to plug into your favorite RSS reader. Pubmed-Sieve is written in Python, and can be run on the web using Binder (a free tool for running Jupyter Notebooks in the cloud: Binder). You can also run it on your own machine/infra if you prefer.

I wrote about making pubmed feeds, so I was understandably enthusiastic when I found out about about this. I ended up making a couple of my own modifications to it, namely adding support for excel spreadsheets and condensing everything into a single script for ease of sharability. I hope that tools like this one make will make it easier for people to use RSS for scholarly work.

I ported it into a colab notebook to share with my friends, since Binder has not been working well for me lately. I’m debating whether to try to build a slack bot that will automate this process into a daily post to a journal club channel for lab things.