ExtraExtra: Journal Contents at a Glance

Academic journals are notoriously difficult to keep up with. They’re locked behind paywalls, update infrequently, and don’t offer very transparent means of notification. As a result, I often find myself feeling out of the loop or oblivious to what’s being published – and when I do happen to spend a couple of hours sifting through journals, I never leave with the feeling that I have gained a broad sense of the state of a discipline.

So, to address this problem, I have tracked down the table of contents RSS feeds for a hundred or so journals – concentrated around film & media studies, new media & game studies, visual culture & cultural studies, and theory/critical theory – and basically embedded them in a broadsheet-styled format. ExtraExtra creates a display that allows the reader to scan the essay titles, or “headlines,” from so many journals.

ExtraExtra can only embed what the feed feeds, so typically only the journal title and essay title, and sometimes the date (when the feed allows it), are included. There are no abstracts or authors. Every item should be clickable and lead to the journal article – and if you’re within a university/subscriber network, you should be able to click thru to the pdf. However, some journals – Yale French Studies, for instance – are indexed only through JStor but are only available three years back – in which case, I have embedded not the JStor feed (which would be severely outdated) but the publisher feed (even if upon clicking thru no electronic copy is available).

My hope is that this resource will be useful to graduate students, faculty, and scholars alike, and that it enables those in the field to get a better sense of where to publish, what journals are out there, and what’s going on in these disciplines. However: the list is incomplete, and I welcome suggestions for new additions (by michelle at testsforge). Some journals don’t have table of contents feeds (especially, ironically, Open Access journals), and some only have private feeds (through Elsevier and InfoTrac, for instance), but otherwise I’m sure the list can be expanded upon. If you have any recommendations or feedback, your comments would be much appreciated.

Javier O’Neil-Ortiz