The Troubled RSS Feeds of Philosophy Journals

I subscribe to a lot philosophy journals's RSS feeds. While I think it's wonderful that almost every philosophy journal has an RSS feed, I think it's too bad that so many of them are so shitty. There are a number of common problems:

  • Many of them don't say who the author of the paper is.

  • It is best when the author of the paper is listed as the author of the post. I guess it's okay if there's no author listed in the unread list, but you really should say who it is somewhere in there.

  • It is especially bad when the person listed as the author of the post is someone other than the author of the paper.

  • Many of them don't say what the paper is about. It is better if there is an abstract.

  • (This is to the authors: When you write up an abstract, you should try to give a sense for what the paper is about.)

  • SOME OF THEM ARE WRITTEN IN ALL CAPITAL LETTERS, WHICH IS REALLY ANNOYING TO READ, SO DON'T DO IT.

  • Many of them don't carry any bibliographic information. It is better when it says right in the post which issue of which journal this is supposed to be.

  • It would be really nice to have a clickable link directly to the fulltext pdf file.
So, I guess what I'm saying is, Thanks for having RSS feeds, journals. Now, could you please optimize them?

--Mr. Zero

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