Are you looking for something bigger than a search alert? Something that returns results that match your search strategy, as well as making connections to other research you didn’t explicitly ask for? Something that adds on a touch of browsability? Then Meta feeds might be for you.

Meta.org, a free tool, is a project of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. A Meta account goes beyond a standard literature search feed by applying machine learning to pull in a larger pool of potentially relevant literature that you didn’t expect to be available. The Help Center’s brief videos make getting started with Meta easy.

Personalize your feeds by adding a search terms or a search strategy. View your feed either in Meta, or in email notifications. Feeds can show not only articles, but related researchers, institutes and centers, and publications. You may group feed results by day, week, or month, and choose to display particular content types, such as preprints, journal articles, clinical trials, or case reports, plus, Meta has future plans to include software and data related to publications. The feeds highlight Open Access content. Save the content that matches your interests to a personal library, or export references to a citation manager. Meta promotes its connections to Mendeley and Kopernio. You can also share your feed publicly, to make further connections.

Use the Discover feature to browse hundreds of feeds, some generated via Meta’s machine learning, and some that have been curated by the Meta staff. Explore Discover feeds by topic or by what’s trending, and view the Altmetrics data to see where content is being discussed and by whom.

If your institution has affiliated with Meta, you can use your institutional email address to activate the Get PDF feature and open the full-text of articles. The Get PDF button connects to the publisher and to PubMed, for alternate methods of acquiring full-text.

Roxanne Bogucka, STEM Liaison Librarian for Health Sciences, Adjunct Assistant Professor. The University of Texas at Austin, Life Science Library. 

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