Yahoo Pipes have been around for a while now. Unfortuantely, I’ve not had the time or inclination to dig around and see what they can do. I’ve now started using them and think they are potentially very powerful. I’m sure, at present, I’m using them crudely. In fact, I’ve so far, simply merged two separate RSS feeds – but it’s a start.

Take this old (2004) ATTRACT answer on exercise and depression. If you view that you’ll see that it has a warning “NOTE: The following question is over two years old. We do not routinely update our answers. Therefore, significant new research may now be available.”

I’ve always wondered about auto-updating of answered. Therefore, I created two separate searches in PubMed (with exercise and depression both as [majr] mesh headings), one for RCTs and one for systematic reviews (via clinical queries) and restricted the date to those articles published after the ATTRACT answer. I then exported the results as an RSS feed and joined them together in Yahoo Pipes. You can see the results here.

If this output was then tagged to the bottom of all appropriate Q&A answers they would, in effect, auto-update.