Frequently Asked Questions

You'll find our prices are among the lowest in the industry. We currently offer three pricing plans for new users:

The one-time 6-month option mainly serves users whose cards do not support US dollars or recurring payments. The prices above do not apply to existing accounts.

User Signup

We encourage every user to try our services for free before signing up, so you can set the right expectations about what they can do. Almost all our existing paid users tried the services before paying.

The free daily quota is 5 review, 10 rewriting and 10 question-answering jobs. Once you reach the daily limit, come back in 24 hours to keep trying. If you need more jobs processed in a single day, subscribe to a paid membership and use the services with no daily limit.

Your payment method is charged at the beginning of each billing cycle unless you cancel before then. To avoid future charges, cancel before the end of the current billing cycle. We also send a reminder email 7 days before the renewal date.

Monthly, half-yearly and yearly subscriptions can be cancelled at any time through the close account link. Your account stays valid until the end of the current billing cycle and is then permanently closed. The one-time payment option (the 6-month plan) has no cancellation choice, since it expires automatically after six months.

Paper Digest subscriptions are non-refundable, and we do not prorate fees for a subscription terminated before the end of its term. In the extremely uncommon situation where an account's activity violates our terms of use or the law, the account is terminated before the end of the billing period and no refund is issued.

If you intended to cancel but narrowly missed the deadline, or have further questions or special requests about cancellation or refunds, email us directly at team@paperdigest.org. We'll try our best to help.

Close Account

Manage Payment Method

You can also email us at team@paperdigest.org and we'll reply with a link you can follow to update your payment method.

Most of our users are on monthly, half-yearly or yearly plans. We authorise Stripe to charge the membership fee on our behalf at the beginning of each billing cycle, and you'll receive a receipt when a payment succeeds. The receipt mainly serves as a reminder that you're still paying for the service.

To cancel, do so before the end of the current billing cycle to avoid being charged for the next one. For example, if you created the account on 15 January, the next billing cycle starts on 15 February. We keep the account valid until the end of the current cycle after cancellation, so if you only want the service for a few days you can cancel immediately after signing up and still use it.

If a recurring payment fails, the associated account is deactivated automatically. If you'd like to keep the account, email us at team@paperdigest.org to sort out the payment issue. You can also create a new account — it's fine to reuse the same email.

Passwords can be changed inside the console under Account | Change Password, or using the button below.

Change Password

The simplest way is to click the "unsubscribe" link at the end of any digest email. You can also disable and re-enable the service with the button below, or inside the console under Account | Enable/Disable Daily Email.

With daily emails disabled you'll stop receiving them but can still read every daily digest through our console, and you keep access to conference digests and all other services.

Enable/Disable Daily Service

There are several possible reasons:

1. Stripe could not collect a monthly or yearly payment from the account.
2. Someone marked our email as spam. When a recipient clicks "Spam" (or "junk", "block", "reject") in their email application, their provider may send us a complaint. We deactivate complaining recipients so they receive nothing further from us. This typically takes effect within 24 hours.
3. Our emails to the account bounced back multiple times.
4. Policy violations — for example account sharing between multiple people, or fraudulent transactions.

A deactivated account cannot log in to the console, and future payments stop. All deactivated accounts are permanently deleted every few months. To continue, create a new account, or contact us to restore the previous one before it is deleted.

If your internet connection is slow you may occasionally see a page hang. Refreshing (F5) or hard-refreshing (Ctrl+F5) usually fixes it. You can also check service status directly.

Service Status

You probably chose to disable the daily digest service when you registered. You can re-enable it with the button below.

Enable/Disable Daily Service

It's also possible the emails are landing in your spam folder or being blocked by your provider. Mark our digests as "not spam" and add us to your safe-sender list.

There are several possible reasons:

1. You haven't selected any interested area. Keywords alone aren't enough — they're only used to generate daily digests when interested areas are also specified.
2. The areas you signed up for aren't very active, so it's normal not to receive updates every day.
3. The paper websites we track, like arXiv, may not release new papers on time because of holidays or outages. We don't send digest emails if the delay is longer than half a day, but we'll mention the issue in the next one. This happens once or twice a year.
4. Your email provider blocked our emails. If messages to an address bounce repeatedly we have to disable the account; if a large share of messages to a domain bounce, we have to limit how many we send to that domain. Users on qq.com and 163.com hit this more often than others.

Universal solution: sign in to the console and read your digests under Digest | My Daily Digest. The contents are identical to the emails.

1. When you create an account we ask you to select at least one of more than 200 research areas. By default we push every new paper in those areas to you — a typical user receives dozens of papers a day.
2. You can also select keywords and authors to track under Account | Update Interests, or by clicking follow this author on an author's profile page or the i-Search page. Papers passing those filters are called "tracking results" and appear at the top of each digest email, marked with an asterisk.
3. You decide how you're notified. The default is a daily email whenever there are new papers in your areas. You can instead receive email only when tracking results are available, or disable the email entirely and read digests online.

Short answer: if you only have time for n papers, read the top n on the daily digest console. We have an algorithm that estimates the potential impact of each new paper, and console results are sorted by it.

Some areas such as cs.AI are very active, so a lot of new papers is expected when several are selected — and it gets worse between January and March when many conference deadlines fall. Other things that help:

1. Narrow your selected interests. Fewer interests means fewer updates.
2. Sort papers by primary category and decide what to read from there.
3. Filter in the console. Sign in to the console and open Digest | My Daily Digest for links to every digest from the last two weeks. For each day you can read new papers only, updates to previous papers, or both, sort by column, and type a keyword in the filter field.
4. Specify authors and keywords to track under Account | Update Interests, then read Digest | My Daily Digest | Tracking Results. For most users this brings the daily count down to single digits. You can also choose to receive only papers by selected authors or with selected keywords.

We run a fairly complex text analysis platform — comparable to those built and used by the largest tech corporations — supporting scientific literature tracking, search, review and rewriting. The platform contains:

1. A central knowledge base storing hundreds of millions of documents.
2. A number of site crawlers tracking new research work in real time.
3. A pipeline with dozens of built-in natural language processing and machine learning components. For paper summary generation alone we have several different algorithms, from rule-based to transformer-based, which we've improved over time with newer techniques.

Given a paper, the system first parses it. A set of candidate generation components then work on the parse results to produce highlight candidates, each using a different strategy: any single sentence can be a candidate, adjacent sentences can be merged into one, sentences connected by co-references can form candidates, and so on. We usually generate a lot of candidates per paper.

Next, a set of scoring components evaluates each candidate from different angles. Some are rule-based and check for desired patterns; some are deep-learning based and score against pre-trained neural networks; some model where the candidate came from, such as the abstract or the conclusion; some check how well it aligns with the title. We have dozens of such generation and scoring components, and the techniques in some of them are exclusive to us. Together they assign each candidate a set of features.

Finally a ranking model ranks all candidates using those features and produces a confidence score. We return the top candidate as the highlight if its confidence is above a threshold. Which components are in the pipeline depends on the application and the data available.