RSS
Recently I’ve started using RSS to great personal delight. This helps me focus my reading on long(er) form content that I find fulfilling and stay away from the juicy candy of comment threads from social news sites like Hacker News. Comment threads are great, but I find the more tempting and less satisfying than articles themselves. Subscribing to some high quality RSS feeds keeps me focused on articles first, and then I can goof off with comment threads when I’m bored. However, I’ve found another great use for RSS, staying on top of the scientific literature. It’s pretty easy, most journals have RSS feeds, which you can subscribe to in your favorite RSS reader. Then, as new articles are published, they pop up in your reader for your review. This is great for me as it’s not an easily deletable and stress inducing unread email, and is mixed up with other juicier RSS feeds from news sources and opinion blogs. I use the Feeder app from F-Droid, which as far as I know is totally distinct from the SaaS platform Feeder.co.
Zotero
Zotero, if you haven’t heard of it, is extremely wonderful citation management software that makes it easy to keep track of papers and generate citations. It even interfaces with Overleaf (if you pay for Overleaf) which means your .bib file will always be up to date. Once I was following papers in my RSS reader, being able to import the papers I’d want to revisit into Zotero was the next step. I think if you’re using a browser based RSS reader, this would be easy to accomplish with the Zotero connector browser extension. However, this is all being done on my phone. I found the very straightforward Android app Send to Zotero which does exactly what I need to do. Now when an article that I might want to reference later pops up in my RSS reader, I simply click the reader’s “share button”, select the “Send to Zotero” app, which adds it to my Zotero account with whatever tags I want. Easy as pie! Other apps with the same functionality (including an iOS app) can be found here. I’m very excited about this workflow, and hope it will keep me up to date with the state of my field.