I tell my students if they want to write research papers, they must consume the academic literature, and one way to go about it is by subscribing to the RSS feeds of the prominent journals.

The RSS feeds will not deliver entire articles (one will need to access the journal through an academic institution to get those), but they will show the titles and the abstracts in the most recent issues; thereby, providing a snapshot of the hot topics and trends others in a scholastic guild are discussing.

This will not only hone the ability to focus a research question, as one acclimates to the lines of inquiry others in a discipline find interesting, but also to identify the critical gaps in the literature that will compel other members of one’s chosen profession to take interest in his or her work by connecting said work to larger currents in the field as a whole.

RSS Aggregators

Inoreader is the aggregator I prefer, although Feedly is probably the most popular.

The feeds

Paste the associated links below into the RSS aggregator you prefer, and the list of feeds will populate.

TESOL: https://www.inoreader.com/reader/api/0/bundle/opml/0014cd63e142

Applied Linguistics: https://www.inoreader.com/reader/api/0/bundle/opml/0014cd63e192

RSS

If you’re not sure what RSS is, it’s a system by which you can receive every post from a given source in a single application. One of the nice features of RSS is that you receive everything from the sources you select as soon as it’s published, rather than only seeing the sources an algorithm predicts you’re most likely to find interesting.

You can learn more about RSS here: