Life Is Too Short For Some Journal Feeds

What scientific journals can you not be bothered to keep up with? I know, sometimes it's tempting to answer "all of them", but a well-informed chemist really should watch what comes out in the better ones. But how about the not-so-better ones? The "Life's too short" ones? Reading journals by RSS gives a person some perspective on signal-to-noise.

One problem is that Elsevier's RSS feeds are sort of perpetually hosed. Are they working now? I haven't checked in a while, because I finally gave up on them. And that means that I don't regularly look at Tetrahedron Letters or Bioorganic and Medicinal Chemistry Letters, even though (once in a while) something interesting turns up there. I look at ACS Medicinal Chemistry Letters more often, just because it has a working RSS feed (and I should note that I've rotated off their editorial board, by the way). Overall, though, I can't say that I miss either of those Elsevier journals, because you have to scroll through an awful lot of. . .stuff. . .to see something worth noting.

The same goes, I'm afraid, for Chemical Communications, and that makes me wonder if it's possible to keep up with the Letters/Communications style journals usefully at all. There are just so many papers pouring through them, and since Chem Comm takes them in from every sort of chemistry there is, vast numbers of them are of little interest to any particular reader. Their mini-review articles are perhaps an attempt to counteract this problem, and the journal also...

Source: In the Pipeline - August 27, 2014 Category: Chemists Tags: The Scientific Literature Source Type: blogs