Automating academic literature searches with RSS Feeds and Google Reader(™).

Behavior analytic practitioners have an ethical obligation to stay abreast of the most recent research developments in their areas of expertise. Although conducting frequent and comprehensive literature searches is one way to meet this mandate, doing so can be a time intensive process. One way to reduce the effort involved in this process is setting up automated literature and news searches using RSS feeds via programs like Google Reader(™). This paper outlines the steps necessary for setting up a Google Reader(™) account and creating customized RSS feeds based on searches of the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) PubMed database and the World Wide Web.