Keeping current

It is a bother to keep current with the scientific literature. Everyone knows it is growing exponentially, although if you look at the new publication histograms on Pubmed they look rather linear. At least over the years after which most papers were actually submitted to Pubmed upon publication, i.e. 1990ies and later. If you pull out the number of publications per year on a given search, let us say "blood pressure" it looks like this:

It rises in fits and starts probably depending on how far back different journals have decided to back-register. If you look at the second graph there does seem to be a flattening of the curve in the sixties and onward indicating that the growth may be linear after all. Sadly, for blood pressure that means 18 000 articles per year as of 2014, and the rate increases with another thousand per year every three years. Working in several fields means trying to keep up with each of them, and makes for a grand total that does not bear thinking about.

Luckily the journals provide current contents feeds that one can read using a RSS. I used Google reader until that was cancelled and now I have moved to the brilliant service CommaFeed, which provides a very clean RSS-reader interface. Below is a screenshot of my current list of journal feeds.

With this kind of list you get a couple of hundred new publications every week, so there is no chance of reading all of them. What I do is skim the titles and selected abstracts in the reader, anything that appears interesting and relevant I will send to Papers to read more thoroughly. In addition, I regularly scan Pubmed for relevant articles, as you do when writing papers, grants, and lectures.