Sounds like a niche idea that may work for some fields. Maybe start with a focus on one just for psychology?

You could actually build the basic software and editors within the relevant fields select the feeds. The same way Healthline got hundreds of doctors to code and categorize medical content, you could get editors in multiple disciplines to identify the sources in their area. The key to the idea is the program that can turn an online profile in a search algorithm. It could be used to convert Ziki, LinkedIn, Naymz, ClaimID all into useful professional search tools.

The question with this is how well will keyword/subject searching work against bodies of literature? For this to work well, and for it to relieve the professional of a large amount of information, it seems like indexing would have to be done perhaps more consistently than it is today.

Also, don't a lot of academic/news database subscriptions include functionality like this already? (ie: mail the users any new results for a particular search, which can contain keywords, subject terms, whatever.) It seems that someone who was looking for that information about new articles would have to be either subscribed to one or those sites, or have an affiliation with an institution that did.

(Example: PsychInfo, ProQuest.)

Hey Zeitgeist - you are right, there are difficulties working from profile keywords up. I would be more inclined to work from the keywords/search terms that are in the databases first. Get users to select keywords that match their interests etc.
Yes, the databases offer email notification services but (open databases excepted), you need to be a member or affiliated with learning institution. Plus the idea stretches beyond these (just getting article updates is pointless). The profile returns information from many (in this case psychology) resources.
You indicated "its been done" - were you referring to the databases or something else? - if it is something else, would love to know about it. If it is the databases, I would argue it has not been done at all.

PsychSplash:

A couple of questions from someone outside your field, for clarification's sake (I have some knowledge of the Sci/Tech publishing world, but that was before this new fangled Interweb thing came about).

Let's assume that we're concentrating on the psychology world:

- How many professional research journals are there in the field?
- Of these, are any freely available without subscription on the web?
- Of the total number of journals, how many are available through services like Lexus/Nexus?

I think there are a number of hurdles to the approach you suggest, mainly issues of copyright and licensing, but here's a twist, and remember, I'm not in the field, so here goes:

A professional psychology community a la Digg (or maybe a la Slashdot), where the community members summarize articles, and the rest of the community votes on/discusses both the article and the summary.

Maybe a section of the site where the authors are interviewed/ or discuss the articles with the members, (could take many forms like call-in discussions, podcast, moderated chat sessions, etc.)

Possible revenue streams (for those who, like myself consider the Dude, How Does This Make Money? tag a little too often sometimes)
- Advertising (Possible advertisers include publishers, membership societies, equipment manufacturers, CME providers, not to mention all those advertisers after those affluent Psychologists.)
- Registrations/Subscriptions
- CME (Continuing Medical Education) Testing (Again, I'm not in the field) I know, for example there are some fields here in the US that have fairly broad definitions of CME (more specifically in my experience, CLE (Legal)), and there are a number of companies that do nothing but provide courses for CLE credits.

Anything here worth a shot?
Cothu

Hi Cothu

You really thought out your response and as such there is a lot of valuable stuff in it. Ill try to address all of your points.

There are hundreds of psychology journals and many crossover medical journal. Generally the only thing available is abstracts (especially for good journals), without a subscription (there are some exceptions). All of the good journals are covered by the main providers (Ovid, Current Contents, etc). PsycInfo is the main database of psychology publications. It is produced by the APA. It is accessed through subscription.
A large number of journals provide RSS feeds of their abstracts. For example I have collected all of the APA journals on this page
http://www.pageflake...m/gareth.furber.ashx

I should emphasize that I am not just considering journal databases. There are a growing number of psychology blogs, news services, websites that could be scraped and searched. This is not just a journal searching idea.

Your Digg-like site for psychology is definately a sound idea, one I have played with before. The primary barrier in my area is that psychologists are less inclined to form and foster large communities, they stick within their areas. They would visit the site, but would be drawn in by it making life easier, rather than having to contribute to it. Any news service for psychs needs to focus on selfish reasons, i.e. it delivers news that is specific to them, hence the profile concept.

I want to emphasize to readers that what I am talking about is an online profile (aka linkedIn) that actually generates search terms for searching through selected sources. Imagine combining your RSS reader with your LInkedIn profile. As you update your resume, so the filtering on your news service improves. The goal is to have an online profile that actually works to scan the web for articles, sites, journals, feeds, that are relevant to your area of work. This idea stretches beyond the scope of psychology, that is simply my example area.