[Feature] Using RSS to get abstracts

[Cod-Zhu]

Congratulations for the first release! The app is working well for me, and the "Send to Zotero" feature is great.

However, I’ve encountered an issue with abstracts. Many of the journals I’m interested in don’t provide abstracts to CrossRef, so I can't view them directly on Wispar. However, I can still see the abstracts on Zotero, Feedly, and Researcher as part of the RSS feeds. The limitation of only being able to read titles and not abstracts makes Wispar a bit less useful for me.

I would like to suggest adding an RSS reader feature as a substitute for Zotero's RSS feed. It doesn’t need to be complex—I’m fine with manually adding the RSS URL, similar to how Zotero works. Of course it would be even better if I can just search and subscribe.

Thank you for considering this!

p.s. A sample journal and its RSS URL: Journal of Economic History, https://www.cambridge.org/core/rss/product/id/677F550CB2C69EFA1656654D487DE504

[Scriptbash]

Hi, thank you very much! 😁 That's a great suggestion, I would also like to have more abstracts available. I checked quickly, but I'm afraid publishers who don't submit abstracts to Crossref, also don't provide abstracts in their RSS feed. I only checked one journal from Elsevier and it was the case, but maybe it's not like this for all publishers?

Were you having problems with the abstracts of the Journal of Economic History (Cambridge University Press) specifically? I checked in Wispar and most publications had abstracts. It seems only the publications about books (with a price tag) were missing. However, they were also missing in the RSS feed when I looked.

I thought of using OpenAlex to fetch additional abstracts, but Elsevier and another big guy went after them to remove their abstracts. 🙁

[Cod-Zhu]

Thank you for your long reply! Here is an additional list of journals whose abstracts are provided in their RSS feeds but not available in Wispar. All of them are top journals in economics.

The Quarterly Journal of Economics
http://qje.oxfordjournals.org/rss/current.xml

The Review of Economic Studies
https://academic.oup.com/rss/site_5508/3369.xml

Econometrica
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/feed/14680262/most-recent

[Scriptbash]

Sorry for the delay. When I looked at the 3 journals you sent, I was able to see the abstracts in Wispar. Can you confirm that the abstracts weren't available for them?

I thought about it, but I don't think RSS feeds are the way to go. Most publishers still don't provide abstracts in their feeds unfortunately and abstracts would be limited to recent publications only. Instead, I think scraping the abstracts would be more effective. It's a bit slow though. I will update the database with the newly fetched abstracts so that it only needs to scrape it once. I will need to adjust the scraping for some edge cases, but currently it works well with Taylor and Francis, Elsevier and Springer! :)

Simulator.Screen.Recording.-.iPhone.16.Pro.Max.-.2025-02-28.at.09.49.35.mp4

[Cod-Zhu]

! That's weird... I checked again and the abstracts were still unavailable in my Wispar (and after several seconds; see the attached video). And the same happened to the article in your video. There must be something wrong 😭

Well, it doesn't matter if it is only my problem. I'm used to reading email alerts from the journals on my laptop every morning now lol. Thank you for your attention.

2025-03-03-2.mp4

[Scriptbash]

Thank you for the video! In my video, the abstracts are expected to be missing since they are unavailable in Crossref. However, the journals you are having issues with do have abstracts in Crossref, so there is definitely something wrong with the app on your end.😔 I used the ISSN as shown in your video and I can see the abstracts just fine. I really hope it's just the setting to hide abstracts that is causing the problem, otherwise I have no idea why this would happen.

Can you double check if abstracts are set to "Hide all abstracts" in Settings > Display > Publication card? Maybe my default values aren't working correctly for some reason 🤔

[Cod-Zhu]

Yeah! Wow! It works now! Thank you very much!

[Scriptbash]

Awesome! I'm glad to hear it's now working correctly! Let me know if you encounter other issues or have feature requests!✌️ The next update is almost ready and will bring some new features and fixes!