We’ve had many a conversation at Figshare about the way people consume the research outputs that are shared through the site. Whilst we all agree that no one ever is just ‘browsing’ academic content, the browse page allows users to filter content to find exactly what they are after. However, customised feeds of content and being notified that colleagues, or areas of research have new datasets or code available would be a huge step in discovering relevant research outputs.

So that is what we have built.

This extensive feature allows a user to “follow” many different aspects across the platform. This might mean updates from a particular author or group. Here’s a full list of the things you can keep track of:

‍

When on any of these entities, you’ll see the ability to follow, e.g. saved searches (which also now build a URL as you add to them):

https://figshare.com/search?q=%3Acategory%3A%20%22Stem%20Cells%22&searchMode=1&licenses=1%2C2&types=2%2C4%2C5%2C

When you have some follow sets, you can manage them under “Account settings”. Under this section, you can label terms to be more manageable, search them, generate RSS links, unfollow or be taken to a context-sensitive representation e.g. followed authors will be taken to author page, search terms taken to search page. You can follow 50 sets maximum and receive up to 10 sets by email in a daily or weekly digest.

E.g. https://figshare.com/rss/general?search=%3Acategory%3A%20%22Stem%20Cells%22&types=2%2C4%2C5%2C9

The functionality is live on the site now, so get following!

You can also see this feature across all of the repositories we are running for institutions, publishers, and funders.

If you are interested in hearing whether these ideas would be a good fit at your institution, please get in touch at support@figshare.com or via twitter, facebook or google+.