Staying Up-to-Date with RSS Feeds

When you perform a search in a database, you are always searching within the current contents of that database. To find out about new books or articles on a topic, you would have to come back to the database and repeat the same search. To save time, many information providers let you use RSS feeds so that you're informed when a new article or book is added that matches your search terms.

An RSS feed sends a continually updated stream of individual notifications. In this respect an RSS feed differs from a newsletter, which is usually sent to you by email every few days or weeks and contains multiple items.

It can be useful to distinguish between two types of RSS feeds:

• News feeds contain information specified by the information provider. A database might use these canned feeds to let subscribers know about new or noteworthy articles. Journals often offer RSS feeds that send out the table of contents for a new issue.
• Search feeds (search alerts) let you know when books or articles are added that match your search query in a particular database.

To read RSS feed messages, you need an RSS reader. Citavi offers an RSS reader that lets you save the bibliographic information for a book or journal article mentioned in a feed to your Citavi project.