Something that should exist

[jedusor]

Science people! You know that website where you make up a list of bands you're interested in seeing live and they notify you when those bands are coming to your hometown? Is there something like that for scientists and their publications? If, for example, I'm interested in the work Barry Green is doing with the effects of temperature on taste sensitivity (SO cool, seriously) and I want to know when his lab publishes new work, is there a service that will notify me?

If not, I might have to make one. I feel like this would be enormously popular.

Comments

[rubrick.livejournal.com]

That's a terrific idea. I have no idea if such a thing exists. (For that matter I didn't know about the concert one.)

A good staring place might be contacting PubMed and seeing if they have an API that would allow this sort of thing (or already have something like that).

[jedusor.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that was the next thing I was going to try, after checking that it hasn't been done.

[rpipuzzleguy.livejournal.com]

Uh, no, I don't know that website. Enlighten?

[jedusor.livejournal.com]

I didn't take note of the URL because I can't afford to go to concerts, so it's not relevant to me right now. I think xthread may have been the one who mentioned it? I'm sure it can't be too hard to find if you're interested, just google "concert alerts" or "tour notifications" or something.

[dougo.livejournal.com]

There are several: last.fm, songkick, tourfilter. I use last.fm because it knows what I listen to (via a plugin in my music player) so I don't have to explicitly list bands.

[dougo.livejournal.com]

I want the same for movies. Actually, even for bands and new releases.

[bookishfellow.livejournal.com]

A lot of databases have "search alert" or some similarly named functionality, where you can set up a standing search for, say, "(au:green OR au:white OR au:brown) AND kw:taste AND kw:temperature" and then whenever a new document matching those criteria is added to the database, you'll get notification via e-mail or RSS feed.