Staying Up-to-Date with RSS Feeds

When you perform a search in a database you always are 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 alert you 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.

Technical Background: RSS is an abbreviation for Really Simple Syndication and Rich Site Summary. The RSS feed is an XML file with the file extension XML, RSS, or RDF which can be downloaded from a website. The provider updates the contents of the file regularly. The RSS reader can read and display the information in a reader-friendly format. In the RSS reader you can mark messages as read in order to hide them.