Google Reader is a fan­tas­tic way to keep track of new papers that are appear­ing in many dif­fer­ent jour­nals, and also to fol­low some of the inter­est­ing research blogs (and blogs on other top­ics) that are out there. Google Reader checks web­sites for you and lets you know of any new mate­r­ial that appears. Instead of you hav­ing to look at dozens of dif­fer­ent web­sites to dis­cover new infor­ma­tion, all you need to do is open up Google Reader and all the infor­ma­tion comes to you. In some ways it is like an email account, but where the mes­sages con­tain new addi­tions to web­sites that you are inter­ested in.

Google Reader is called an “RSS reader” because it reads RSS feeds. RSS stands for “Really Sim­ple Syn­di­ca­tion”. A web­site with an RSS feed makes it pos­si­ble to track addi­tions to the site with­out actu­ally vis­it­ing it your­self.  There are other RSS read­ers, but Google Reader is the most widely used. Recently Google Reader added a facil­ity so that it now also tracks sites that don’t have RSS feeds.

If you haven’t used it before, here’s how to get started.

1. Go to www​.google​.com/​r​eader and log in. If you already have a Google account (e.g., you’re a Gmail user), then just use your usual Google details. If you don’t have a Google account, then you will need to set one up.
2. Click “Add sub­scrip­tion” and type the URL of any web­site you want to track.
3. When you are read­ing a web­site that you would like to sub­scribe to, click the orange RSS but­ton that looks like this:
4. A mod­ern browser such as Fire­fox or Chrome will fig­ure out that you want to sub­scribe to the RSS feed. If that doesn’t work, just copy the link address and paste it into the “Add sub­scrip­tion” box in Google Reader.

Each morn­ing I read through any­thing new on Google Reader includ­ing new research papers in jour­nals that I track, new arti­cles on some sta­tis­tics blogs that I fol­low, etc. In fact, I have over 500 sub­scrip­tions! I don’t read every arti­cle or it would take all day, but I do scan the head­lines and read what looks interesting.

It can take a while to col­lect all the sub­scrip­tions for jour­nals you might want to read. To make it easy, you can just piggy-​​back on my jour­nal col­lec­tion (which cov­ers all sta­tis­tics jour­nals, both fore­cast­ing jour­nals, plus a few econo­met­rics and demog­ra­phy jour­nals, as well as all sta­tis­ti­cal preprints on arxiv). Click here if you want to sub­scribe to all the same jour­nals as me.

If you are inter­ested in R, R-​​bloggers is very use­ful as it com­bines the posts from a large num­ber of blogs about R.  Just go to the site and click on the RSS feed icon and you will be able to add a sub­scrip­tion to your Google Reader account.

For those who like to keep up with LaTeX, the TeX com­mu­nity aggre­ga­tor does some­thing sim­i­lar for blog­gers writ­ing about LaTeX and related top­ics. Again, just click on the RSS feed icon.

This web­site has an RSS feed, as do my other web­sites. Just click the but­ton at the top-​​left of the page and select “Google Reader” and then you will receive any new posts I make in your Google Reader account.

Related Posts:

• Blog aggre­ga­tors
• Sav­ing web pages for later reading
• Fol­low­ing authors on Google Scholar
• Blogs about research
• RSS feeds for sta­tis­tics journals