Keeping upto date with the latest advances in oncology is a daunting task. Every week pubmed indexes about 100 new articles on radiation oncology alone (how do i know ? See below). Keeping upto date with your reading list is a daunting list for the busy practitioner. Social media like Twitter, Orkut, Facebook and Google Buzz are great ways to keep in touch with your friends and families. You can leaveage the power to keep upto date with the reading list and also use the power of social media to learn with your colleagues.
First the prerequisites:
- A google account - a gmail account if you have one will do
- Access to internet.
- Willingness to do a bit of typing :-)
The services required will be:
- Gmail and Google Buzz (integrated in gmail)
- Google reader
- Pubmed / Sciencedirect / Any other major publishing house website / Journal
The basis behind the howto is to leverage the power of RSS feeds to allow the articles published in various journals come to you instead of the other way round. To know more about RSS you can check this page out.
The first step is therefore to go to pubmed and do a search in a topic of your interest that you want to keep reading about in the future.
Click on the RSS link to get a drop down. You can edit the number of items you will like to read each week (choose 100 if you are searching for something non specific like IMRT in head and neck cancer). You can change the title of the feed too if you want.
Clicking on the create RSS feed button will generate a small pop up window
Click on the orange xml button to get another page which will allow you to subscribe to the feed. Choose Google from the drop down menu.
A new page will then open that will allow you to choose if you want to see the feed in google home page or google reader. I like the reader interface.
Choosing google reader will allow you to access google reader after you have authenticated yourself with your gmail user id and password. The interface is neat and designed to allow you to read the articles without distractions. You will see a series of buttons below each article. Clicking on the share button will allow you to share it with your google buzz friends
You can choose to add a note or comment on the article to share your insight on the article with your friends.
Clicking on share will send the article to your google buzz account for viewing by your colleagues who can in turn see the link and add their own comments.
The biggest advantage of the system is that you and your colleagues can filter out articles really fast and using the comment feature learn more from them. Google buzz is a free service that you can learn more about here. Most likely its activated in your gmail account. Using your orkut / gmail friend circle you can have a nice GD / JC sort of thing on it easily.
You can view a presentation of the thing here http://docs.google.com/present/view?id=df4tz246_408c4fk4whs
P.S. How did i know that figure . Google reader has a interesting service called trends that allows you to see what is going on with the feed. You can use this technique to find a happening topic for your next research idea !!!!