I received a press release from the folks at ScienceDirect announcing their “TOP25” service:
These most popular lists are published on the TOP25 website but you can also register and set-up free email alerts – a great way for busy researchers to efficiently pin-point those “must-read” articles.
Elsevier’s ScienceDirect is used by about 10 million people, which means you can be sure that the TOP25 is an authoritative, one-stop method of finding out what your peers and colleagues are reading.
I have two complaints, one minor, one major. The minor one first — a quarterly updating to the alert may make sense, but more frequent updates would be better. Particularly in regard to my major complaint.
My major complaint is that receiving these alerts by email is all well and good — but where’s the RSS? If done properly, a library could get RSS feeds for use on a subject guide, for example, that include OpenURL links links, pre-formatted for the library’s link resolver. That would drive visitors to the ScienceDirect site and make my life easier.
UPDATE 13 November 2006 10:00 AM: In response to my email (with similar suggestions oulined above) to ScienceDirect, I received a reply from Brant Emery, the TOP25 Project Manager at ScienceDirect. He wrote (quoted with his permission):
…. We will also be implementing RSS feed capability for our other ScienceDirect alerts – the Volume/Issue, Search, Citation and Topic alerts very soon.
So stay tuned…