OvidSP and RSS feeds

I must be in a blogging mood or something (more like trying to avoid actual writing), but I feel inspired to post again.  Today, for the first time, the test RSS feeds I set up using OvidSP came through with new items.   Since no one has written much about OvidSP’s feeds yet, at least that I’ve seen, I’ll give you a brief overview.  They are weird.  There, that’s basically it (maybe one of these days I’ll do a whole review with screenshots and tutorial bits and whatnot, but not today).   If it wasn’t for the whole dependence on subject headings thing, I’d basically never use OvidSP over Scopus, which does everything so seamlessly.

I subscribed to a search feed (not a table of contents feed) from Current Contents.  The RSS feed shows up with the article title as the title, but at least in the feed I am seeing in Google Reader, the only other information you get is the abstract and perhaps some keywords–i.e., no source information comes in the RSS feed.  Here’s what I really *do* like, though–when you click on the title, if your institution subscribes to the full text of the article via Ovid, you get jumped to the HTML version of the full text.  Otherwise, you get jumped to an abstract.  In my abstract, my institution’s link resolver shows up, but I’m not sure if that’s because I’m on the network, or if it identifies the RSS feed with my personal account.  I guess I’ll have to do some more research.

What would make sense for Ovid to do, especially since they are requiring you to have a personal account to use RSS feeds, is to put your institution’s link resolver into the RSS feed–it would save a step.  Also, it really ought to be a no-brainer that having source information in the feed is important.  I’ve only tested this on Google Reader, though, so maybe it is there in other readers.  Unknown.

Has anyone else tested out the OvidSP RSS feeds?