Automating academic literature searches with RSS Feeds and Google Reader(™).
Automated RSS feeds shrink daily literature-search time and help BCBAs stay ethically current.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Eidelman (2011) wrote a step-by-step guide. It shows how to make PubMed send new articles to Google Reader. No new data were collected. The paper is a recipe, not an experiment.
What they found
The guide works. Once set up, new studies arrive in your inbox without extra clicks. The author did not measure time saved or articles read.
How this fits with other research
Johnstone et al. (1996) first put JEAB and JABA online. You had to visit the site. Eidelman (2011) moved the articles closer to you through RSS.
Gilroy et al. (2019) leap ahead. They tell you to store data and code on GitHub. RSS feeds keep you aware; GitHub keeps you transparent. The two tools stack.
West et al. (2025) go even further. They scrape entire college websites to map autism programs. RSS waits for journals to publish; scraping grabs what is already there. All three papers share one goal: let computers hunt while you work.
Why it matters
You must stay current to meet Ethics Code 1.01. Ten minutes of set-up gives you a daily feed of new behavior-analytic studies. Pair the feed with GitHub and scraping skills and you both consume and produce open science. Start today: open PubMed, click “Create RSS,” paste the link into any modern reader, and tomorrow’s evidence finds you.
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Join Free →Open PubMed, run a search for your main client population, click “Create RSS,” and add the feed to Feedly or Outlook.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
Behavior analytic practitioners have an ethical obligation to stay abreast of the most recent research developments in their areas of expertise. Although conducting frequent and comprehensive literature searches is one way to meet this mandate, doing so can be a time intensive process. One way to reduce the effort involved in this process is setting up automated literature and news searches using RSS feeds via programs like Google Reader(™). This paper outlines the steps necessary for setting up a Google Reader(™) account and creating customized RSS feeds based on searches of the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) PubMed database and the World Wide Web.
Behavior analysis in practice, 2011 · doi:10.1007/BF03391776