Introduction

RSS or Really Simple Syndication, is a web feed in a simple, standardised computer-readable format. When you access a website, the classic example being a blog, there will often be an associated RSS feed that you can follow and get alerts whenever there’s an update. This makes following feeds that you are less likely to return to, such as your text editor’s blog, much easier. And on the more academic front, it is a lot easier than trawling though email newsletters, such as journal alerts, for the information you care about, whilst allowing for advanced features like automatic searching for phrases you care about, such as NV centre (we’ll get to that later).

RSS feeds vs email alerts

You probably have a bunch of emails coming in each week from publications such as Nature, Science etc. RSS feeds fill the same role, in an easier to read format. They also allow you to keep an easily-accessible archive of the papers in a journal, and make it really easy to search your feeds. When I first set up my RSS feeds this made my weekly literature skim much faster: just search for terms I care about and discard the rest.

Where to get RSS feeds

OK so where do you find these feeds? I’ll give you my feeds in an easy to import method (and my library) in a sec. First of all you can usually find them on journal home pages for example Nature has it in the top-right corner.

Nature has an easily accessible RSS feed link in the top-right.

For some RSS readers you may need to copy the path at this link (e.g. https://www.nature.com/nature.rss) instead of clicking on it (which will download the .rss or .atom file directly that your RSS reader will be able to process). Alternatively, your web browser may give you a little RSS icon when you’re on a page with an associated feed.

Firefox automatically found the RSS link, as shown by the icon in the address bar. You need to install the Awesome RSS extension to use this feature.

From a quick search most of the browsers have an available add-on/extension to do something similar to firefox. Alternatively, I sometimes try chucking a /feed, /rss or /atom on the end of a url, and I think more than half the time it comes up with sometime, although that can be an empty (not-updated) feed. Of course you can always try a google for the feeds too.

ArXiv

ArXiv has a rather complicated API that allows you to have an RSS feed that acts as a search - there’s a bunch of dense information here. I’ll copy my URLs here to try and help you, but I’m no expert so you’re going to have to mess around until it works for you (plug it into your address bar and see if something comes back). NV arXiv search:

https://export.arxiv.org/api/query?search_query=all:%22nitrogen%20vacancy%22+OR+all:%22quantum%20diamond%20microscope%22$id_list=&start=0&max_results=20&sortBy=submittedDate&sortOrder=descending

And hBN arXiv search:

https://export.arxiv.org/api/query?search_query=%28all:%22hexagonal%20boron%20nitride%22+OR+all:hBN%29+AND+%22spin%20defect%22&id_list=&start=0&max_results=20&sortBy=submittedDate&sortOrder=descending

The basic syntax is the export API base, then you let them know you’re providing a search query. All those % signs are escapes for symbols like whitespace. You can AND and OR different search terms, and then you need to finish with &id_list= and follow by some parameters. Just copy the parameters I have. If you have any tips here however, I’d love to hear em. Also any help for APIs of other preprint servers would be appreciated, though personally I only require arXiv.

Searchable Databases

Now most of my colleagues rely upon Google Scholar for almost all of their publication awareness. Google scholar is really horrible to use from an API perspective, in essence there isn’t one. On the other hand we have the delightfully vaporwave Internet Archive Scholar which is more recent, but I enjoy using it a lot more, and it has a huge amount of support for RSS - I won’t bother writing down how to do it, it’s so easy. OK I will write down my searches though, NV first:

https://scholar.archive.org/feed/rss?q=nitrogen+vacancy+centre+widefield+quantum+diamond+microscope&filter_type=everything&filter_availabilty=everything
https://scholar.archive.org/feed/rss?q=%22hexagonal+boron+nitride%22+hbn+spin+defect+quantum+sensing&filter_type=everything&filter_availabilty=everything "Search-feed"

but I’ll note that I just pasted the ones that IAS gave me.

The last database I use and want to mention is Open Access Theses and Dissertations. Now theses are in my opinion one of the best ways to learn about a new subject, as students often provide a lot of the backstory and context, and write down information in a more accessible manner. OATD gives you one database to search to find open access theses published around the world - how great! Now… unfortunately they don’t have an RSS API, so instead I had to setup a custom feed, so let’s talk about how to do that.

Custom feeds

If you have a site that doesn’t give you an RSS feed, no problem, you can scrape one yourself. Or more accurately use someone else’s tool to do so. I use Feed43 as it has a free plan, and it’s very easy to use, but if you google there are tonnes more. You can go and have a play yourself I don’t want to go through the trauma character building experience, but you can just use my feeds if you want:

https://feed43.com/oatd_nv.xml
https://feed43.com/oatd_hbn.xml

Other

In the wider world, some things you might want to follow that have RSS feeds:

• Bartosz Ciechanowski’s blog, the best I’ve ever come across
• xkcd
• Hacker News feeds
• Scott Aaronson’s blog
• Quanta mag
• Qnami
• QZabre
• The Physics magazine from APS
• Physics Today

Transferring/sharing RSS feed libraries (OPML)

Libraries can be shared between readers or computers with Outline Processor Markup Language (OPML) files. I’ve put all of the science feeds in my library here so hopefully that saves someone some trouble.

How to read your RSS feeds

There are many RSS readers available, and even more listicles comparing them. You probably already have Outlook so you can start there, otherwise Feedly with its web interface is quite popular. On Linux I recommend Akregator if you want a traditional GUI interface. However I heartily recommend Newsboat.

Newsboat

My home feed in Newsboat. The feeds with an arrow are query feeds.

The undeniable monarch of RSS feed readers! So yeah it’s terminal based, so if not using a mouse is scary don’t do it. Or do it, I promise it isn’t that hard and it’s great fun. The main reason to use newsboat is that it is fast and highly configurable. For example, you can setup filters pretty quickly, and then save those filters as ‘query feeds’. I have one large query filter setup for everything ‘Relevant’ to me, which is basically a bunch of ORs on terms I care about, like title =~ \"diamond\" which expands as title contains diamond. This query feed dramatically reduces the time I spend looking through all the feeds.

My 'Relevant' query feed.

The docs are wonderful, but here’s a few key tips I’ve acquired over the years:

• config is in ~.newsboat/config
• Ctrl-n to toggle read status
• o to open in browser (or Shift-O to also mark read)
• Shift-e to edit urls (~.newsboat/urls)
  • look at documentation for tag settings, query feeds etc. - very nice!
• Shift-n to toggle/untoggle read
• n to go to next unread (moves through feeds looking for unreads as well)
• Shift-s (filter) -> unread = "yes" on an article list to get unread items
• Can also pass rss feeds through a filter: command see here

Conclusion

Once again I hope there was some helpful information for you here, and that I’ve convinced you to move on to some more modern (1999) technology! There’s probably a bunch I’ve missed on this topic so please send in any recommendations you have and I’ll add them here somewhere, or any difficulties you have as well.

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