How I find what I read when I read about biology
ecology
evolution
practices
An incredible number of papers are published in academic journals each week (Hanson et al. 2024), of which a tiny proportion are relevant and interesting to my research. So, how should one go about finding the needles in the haystack?
One approach could be to outsource the curation to algorithms, like Google Scholar, or to so-called “social” media feeds (the usual suspects)1. For many reasons, these approaches are just not for me. I don’t like that I can’t express what I’m interested in, and I’m not sure I would trust that the output is complete even if I could. Ideally, I would be able to flick through a list of broadly pre-filtered papers and, from a glance at titles, abstracts and authors, pick out things that are likely to be interesting to me. And luckily, that exact thing exists. It’s called a news aggregator.
Since 2017, Zotero has been able to act as a news aggregator2. You provide a list of RSS feeds sourced from journal websites or preprint servers (this is the broad pre-filtering), and you get a simple text list of everything recently published in those sources. I make a point of skimming through this list every two weeks or so and have done so since 2018.
Since some publishers seem intent on hiding their RSS feeds, below I have listed the RSS feeds for all the journals currently on my list (as of 2026-07-27). If, for some reason, you want to easily import all of these into Zotero, I have compiled them into an OPML file that you can import.
References
Hanson, M. A., P. G. Barreiro, P. Crosetto, and D. Brockington. 2024. The strain on scientific publishing. Quantitative Science Studies 5:823–843.