Literature Search II: Keep you up in Research – the Virtual Journals and RSS Feeds!

We know how to search relevant papers but science is a very fast developing field, especially the optic communities. To keep up we have to know what is published but we can´t do every week an extensive literature search. The solution is very easy but still satisfying: virtual journals and RSS feeds!

A virtual journal presents an online collection of relevant papers from different journals published during the last week or month. In physics the virtual journals by the American Institute of Physics (AIP) and the American Physical Society (APS) are very good, covering 5 topical areas:

virtual journals

For optics it is called:

virtual journal of ultrafast science

But also the ones for quantum information and nanoscale science contain a lot of optic papers:
virtual journal of quantum information
virtual journal of nanoscale science & technology
The first two mentioned are updated every month, the nanoscale science even every week! But although virtual journals present a good overview about relevant and interesting papers for the community, papers relevant to our work are perhaps (or mostly) not published there. Hence, we have to find an additional way to search relevant papers for us… and RSS feeds will help us a lot.


RSS feeds stands for “Really Simple Syndication” and are placed on many web-pages today. They provide you with the newest articles, information and news on the web-page. You only have to click on the RSS logo and then you can create a folder in the favorite of your browser. Today, more convenient is to connect them directly to your email client or reader. All advanced clients or readers support them (if you don’t have one, search for thunderbird or google reader). Really powerful are RSS feeds if you combine them with word-filters of your email client/reader program! Using the keywords of your research, your email/ reader program collects directly all relevant papers out of hundreds of papers. You don’t have to check them all personally.

Enjoy the lecture ;)!