Help me read magazines online more comfortably.

My university subscribes to a large number of electronic journals that can be read this way. You should probably just contact your librarian for advice relevant to your specific library.

To explain what I currently find frustrating. For Lexis Nexis, I have to go to Economist.com first to get the headlines of the current issue. Then I have to type the headline into the Lexis Nexis search box to get the article, and click through twice to download it. I have to repeat this for each article. The Expanded Academic's interface is slightly better in that I can go to "Publication Search" and get results of articles from the same Volume number. However, the website has a very slow response time. It also outputs the title of 20 articles at a time, so I have to go through different pages to get the whole edition. I also have to click-through each article title.

For fairly common publications such as The Economist, your college library almost certainly has the latest issue(s) available for browsing in its periodicals section. Why not read the deadtree version there, and you can pull particularly interesting articles from Nexis or Expanded Academic for your archives if you'll want to refer to them again later?

Though not exactly kosher, various bittorrent sites regularly have the latest editions of various popular magazines available for download in pdf format, with The Economist being one of them.

many colleges and universities list all of the journals and periodicals they might have direct electronic access to. you might want to check that. they usually offer access to university affiliates.

In Lexis, you can go to the individual publication you're looking for (if your Lexis is like my Lexis, there is an option for this under "News and Publications"). Then just put in the date range that will include the date you want (choose within the week, or month, or whatever). If you leave the box blank, it'll give you all the articles from that issue. You still have to read individual articles, but you would at least be able to see the headlines through Lexis and not have to look them up. If that makes sense.

Specifically to your question: Is there a way to automate this process? (through greasemonkey or imacros I can't find anything in the standard Greasemonkey script repository or publicly announced on other sites, but a Google search shows other requests similar to yours (maybe they are your requests, I dunno). However, what you want sounds like really simple stuff. Greasemonkey, and probably iMacros, can easily do tasks like this: basic automation of browser interactions is trivial to implement using Greasemonkey. So the answer is a definite yes, you can automate the process. That's a lot of what they do and why they exist. It sounds simple enough that I would look at what's involved in getting a working script for you, but I don't have a LexisNexis account. However, if you program, writing a script yourself wouldn't be hard. If you don't program and still want to go an automation route, people who code custom scripts are available, I've seen mention of script-oriented sites about the net. Or, a couple of people around MetaFilter do custom scripts for what appear to be reasonable rates; if you express an interest, they'll probably find you. As a GM alternative, from its feature write-up iMacros should do the work without the programming muss or fuss. No personal knowledge of or experience with it myself.

You need to use the saved search or clipping function of either westlaw or lexis. Construct a search to find the last n days of articles from the particular source, and configure the service to run once every n days and email you the results.

Monju: I can't find the clipping function in "Lexis Nexis Academic." Maybe only the law school versions of Lexis Nexis and Westlaw support these features.