rss feeds for new research in classics and philosophy

Following up on my previous post, I’ve pulled together just a few RSS feeds from some sites in classics and philosophy that help me stay on top of newly published research. To fetch these feeds, I use Newsblur, easily the best RSS reader I’ve found since Google Reader got axed.¹

Two important subscriptions for book reviews:

There are regular updates to the feeds for Bryn Mawr Classical Review (feed) and Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews (feed). These two outlets publish lots and lots of reviews of new monographs, and I find it pretty essential to use RSS to stay on top of the steady deluge of postings.

Easy feeds from open-access outlets:

Some open-access journals like Philosophers’ Imprint (feed) and Informal Logic (feed) and Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies (feed) provide RSS feeds for their latest issues, including links to PDF versions of full articles. Journals don’t publish as often as the above book review sites, but when a new issue comes out, you’ll know right away.

Traditional (i.e., not open-access) journals are far less likely to publish feeds for their new articles, I imagine largely on account of paywalls found at the majority of academic publishers. After a quick peek at, say, Classical Quarterly or Arion, I can’t find feeds to stay on top of their latest articles. A real bummer.

A couple semi-solutions for journals without feeds:

Philosophy as a discipline seems to be much savvier as far as distributing new research on-line. Brian Leiter, to take one example, recently linked to a new service called “Philosophy Paperboy” which bills itself as a “newspaper for philophers.” It pulls from a huge variety of journals and posts a list each day of newly published material.

I find the Paperboy site to be a great resource, if a bit overwhelming—I’d like to have some granular control over how many journals I receive updates from. And Philosophy Paperboy unfortunately doesn’t publish its own RSS feed of updates, so you need to visit the site every day to check for publications.

Instead of Paperboy, I use PhilPapers, the discipline-wide and (as far as I can tell) widely used site for finding and archiving philosophy research. (It’s a little bit like arxiv, but for philosophy.) In addition to hosting copies of new research, PhilPapers also allows users to create custom RSS feeds to receive notifications of new research from specific journals. Although it doesn’t seem to create RSS feeds for individual journals (e.g., Mind), you can nevertheless set up a feed for a collection of your favorite journals—one that might be a little more manageable than the firehose over at Philosophy Paperboy.

While logged into PhilPapers, you can open their list of “New Journal Articles”, where you’ll find in the right sidebar a section for a “Custom Filter.” In that sidebar, you’ll want to click on “edit” next to “My journals.”:

You’ll then find a (very long) list of all the journals that PhilPapers monitors, and you can check which ones you’d like to receive updates on. Once you save your journals, you can return to the “New Journal Articles” page and look again in the right sidebar for the feed to monitor your custom list of publications:

What about classics journals?

As I mentioned above, philosophy as a discipline seems to have a lot more technological infrastructure for keeping up with research—I find PhilPapers really impressive and helpful. But less philosophically inclined classicists can piggyback on some of these resources. Because of significant disciplinary overlap, you’ll find several classics-related journals at PhilPapers, and you can add them to your custom RSS feed. In that long list of journals that PhilPapers monitors, you’ll find Classical Quarterly and Arion, yes, as well as Classical World, the American Journal of Philology, and several others. A lot of the really big classics journals, however, aren’t there—no TAPA, no Arethusa, no Gnomon.