Based on my twitter feed, there were two main news yesterday: the election of an old dude in Rome, and the not very classy decision of Google to kill Reader in a few months. As you can guess, I am much more concerned about that second one, for my daily work routine. I have expressed my love for RSS previously. As of today, my strategy hasn’t changed. RSS is still the best way, by far, to keep track of new articles.

Many people today are claiming that RSS is dead, and twitter will do the job instead. Not at all, as far as I am concerned. I have a very different usage for both. I use twitter to discover recommendations and keep track of the scientific buzz around. The constant flow of tweet is nevertheless a guarantee that I will miss some stuff. It’s ok. It’s in the very nature of twitter. When it comes to tracking new articles in journals, twitter just doesn’t do the job. I use (mostly) Google Scholar to search for article on a topic in which I have some interest. Something specific. But it’s definitely not a tool for systematic tracking of new papers. My current RSS feed currently comprises around 50 journals, 30 blogs, and roughly 40 RSS feed of Scopus search results or equivalent. Since October 2008, I have  read over 300k items in Reader. The counter is stuck at 300k for over a year, actually. My current feed provides about 3k items per month (I used to have much more). I spend about 10-15 min per day to keep track of new articles, and usually discover 2 or 3 new papers of interest for me, not directly related to my specific niche (freezing !). If I need to visit every single journal website to get the same information… well, there’s just no way. RSS is still the best choice. No question.

My second constraint is that during my day, I use 2 different computers, a phone and an iPad to check on my RSS feed, depending on where I am and what I do. Reader was providing a flawless solution for the sync. There will be another one soon, that’s ok.

The only question left now is: how long will Google Scholar survive? Reader was much more useful to me, and I guess I’m not the only one like this in the academic world. There are now ads in Scholar. I don’t see why they should even bother keep working on it, unless they have some long terms plans for it that goes beyond the simple search engine it is today. By which I mean an iTunes store-like system for academic papers, for instance.

Will I survive ? Of course, because I don’t have the choice. I will export my RSS feed to another service and keep using it. I will miss the convenience of Google Reader until a better solution comes up. Good bye, you’ve served me well.