Keeping up with journals with ticTOCs

One useful and interesting source of details about the world is tables of contents of academic journals.  Often you can get a sense for how a scholarly field behaves and how it's thinking by reading titles and abstracts, even if you can't actually get at the paper itself because of various obstacles to public access.

from the ticTOCs web site

The ticTOCs Journal Tables of Contents service makes it easy for academics, researchers, students and anyone else to keep up-to-date with newly published scholarly material by enabling them to find, display, store, combine and reuse thousands of journal tables of contents from multiple publishers. With ticTOCs, it only takes a tick or two to keep up to date.

The workflow for this system runs as follows: select some journals to follow, and build a customized feed from that journal set.  You can either read that feed from their site or export it to your favorite RSS reader (or your favorite application that reads feeds and processes them for you).  If you have a bunch of feeds saved up you can even export it as OPML which is a portable data format.

Access to any of the articles is still subject to the usual byzantine academic and scholarly publication rules, e.g. some will be open access, some will be weirdly licensed, and some will be pay per page.  I haven't used it enough to know if there's any kind of intelligent proxy based server integration for those who are off site.

This is incidentally how I found the transportation study in the previous post - find a likely journal, read tables of contents of a recent issue, see which jargon matches up with the problem you're trying to look at.  Full text searches are useless until you figure out the jargon, and tables of contents and abstracts are chock full of weird words that make perfect sense within a field and mean nothing (or something completely different) in the mundane world.

Comments

[Terry Bucknell]

If your library uses EZproxy then they can update their EZproxy config file so that you can access ticTOCs via EZproxy. Full-text links from ticTOCs to publishers' sites will then give you access to full-text (if your library has subscriber access and has configured EZproxy to work with that site too).

That's what we do on our own page about feeds for current awareness:

http://www.liv.ac.uk/library/techserv/ejrnl/rss.html

If you export your feeds from ticTOCs to another feed reader and you are outside your library's IP range then you would have to rely on whatever other facilities your library provides to enable 'off-campus' access, e.g. Shibboleth (where publishers support it), a LibX toolbar, a Citrix server or a proxy server.

[help with dissertation]

Blogs are good for every one where we get lots of information for any topics nice job keep it up !!!