Tutorials

How to Set Up Your Daily Digest: A Personalized Paper Alert in 2 Minutes

Every day, tens of thousands of new papers appear across arXiv, PubMed, medRxiv, bioRxiv, and thousands of conferences and journals — plus industry news, community discussions, clinical trials, and code releases. But you have time to browse a handful of papers and a couple of pieces of news a day, at most. Keeping up with the literature is therefore not a finding problem; it is a selection problem: out of everything published today, which few deserve your limited time? The Daily Digest is built around that question.

Selection at this scale is genuinely hard. A paper's importance has to be judged the moment it is released — hours after it appears, before citations or social signals exist — and that judgment can only be learned from historical data: what did past breakthrough papers look like on day one? This is the problem Paper Digest has specialized in since 2018, working from one of the broadest corpora in the field — very few paper alert services track this many sources — backed by a database of tens of millions of researcher profiles. Selection, and connecting any paper to related papers, patents, grants, and experts, is what we do best. The proof arrives daily: many of the papers our impact ranking puts on top become the trending papers of the next day.

And selection is just the start. Once the right paper is in front of you, the digest helps with what comes next: positioning it in the literature, with related work and the experts behind it one click away; reading it, with the AI Academic Reader, where you can ask the paper questions, keep comments, and add tags; and keeping it, saved to your research library so you can categorize it and come back to it any time. The digest is the front door to that whole workflow.

The part you control takes one to two minutes: tell the system what you care about, once, on a single settings page. This tutorial walks through every field on that page, what each one does to your digest, and where your updates show up afterwards.

Step 1: Sign in

Sign in at paperdigest.org/user_login. The Daily Digest is part of every Paper Digest membership — there is nothing separate to subscribe to.

Not a member yet? You can see what the digest covers before deciding: the Daily Digest Preview lists up to 20 selected papers per subject for each day of last week, no account needed. If that is roughly what lands in your field every day, the personalized version will be that — filtered down to your exact interests. And the Daily Digest is just one of the tools a membership unlocks; the full list is at paperdigest.org/services.

Step 2: Open Update Interests

From the top menu, go to Account | Update Interests. Everything in this tutorial happens on this one page: your basic information (name and institution), your research areas, the authors and keywords you follow, and your delivery settings.

Step 3: Select your research areas

This is the only required choice, and the one that shapes your digest most. Every paper Paper Digest ingests is automatically assigned to research areas — so the areas you select here decide what enters your digest at all. There are more than 200 areas to choose from, organized under nine subjects:

• Physics
• Math
• Computer Science
• Quantitative Biology
• Finance
• Statistics
• Electrical Engineering and Systems Science
• Biology
• Health Sciences

Open a subject to see its specific fields — for example, Computer Science expands into Artificial Intelligence, Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, Robotics, and three dozen more — and check the ones you would actually read. You can select as many areas as you like, across as many subjects as you like; Select all and Clear buttons on each subject make bulk changes quick. Interdisciplinary work is exactly why multiple selections are allowed: a computational biologist might pick fields under Computer Science, Quantitative Biology, and Health Sciences at once.

One tip: prefer specific fields over entire subjects. The digest is sorted by potential impact either way, but tighter areas mean a shorter, sharper daily list. You can always come back and widen.

Once saved, you can see the result immediately in your online daily digest — the same selection also drives your daily emails.

Step 4: Follow authors (optional)

Following authors adds a second, sharper filter on top of research areas: whenever a followed author publishes, the paper is flagged for you. There are two ways to follow someone:

• On the Update Interests page: click + Add author, type one or more names separated by commas — for example, Andrew Y. Ng, Sridhar Mahadevan — and press Enter.
• From an author's profile page: open the author's page, like paperdigest.org/isearch/?name=andrew_ng, and click Follow. This is the convenient route when you have just discovered someone through a paper: check their track record first, then follow in one click.

Author matching runs against Paper Digest's database of tens of millions of researcher profiles, so it works for established names and early-career researchers alike.

Step 5: Follow keywords (optional)

Keywords let you track topics that cut across research areas — a method, a disease, a dataset, a material. On the Update Interests page, click + Add keyword, type keywords separated by commas — for example, relation extraction, question answering — and press Enter. Use the phrases you would type into a search box; multi-word phrases work fine.

Followed authors and keywords feed the Daily Niche Tracking section of your digest — the most personalized part of the daily email, built purely from what you chose to follow.

Step 6: Tune your delivery settings, then save

Three optional settings control what lands in your inbox. The online digest always includes all matched papers; these settings shape the email.

• Followed authors and keywords only — limits the papers in your daily email to those matching the authors and keywords from steps 4 and 5. The rest of the email — industry news, trending papers, community posts — stays as is, and on days with no matching papers, no email goes out at all. Check this for a laser-focused author and keyword alert; leave it unchecked to keep the broader area-based paper coverage.
• Pause daily emails — stops the daily email without touching your settings; your online digest keeps updating. Uncheck to resume delivery. Useful for vacations and deadline weeks.
• Enable extensive search — also includes loosely related papers, in daily emails and the online daily and weekly digests. Most users keep this on: it is how adjacent-field papers you would not have searched for find their way to you. Turn it off if you want strict matching only.

Finally, enter your password to confirm the changes and click Save Changes. That is the whole setup.

Step 7: Read your daily digest

Your updates now arrive in two places:

• Daily email, Monday to Friday. The first one arrives the next business day. Depending on your settings and interests, it covers the day's new papers and clinical trials sorted by potential impact, trending papers, your niche tracking results, plus industry news and top community discussions in your fields.
• Online, any time, at paperdigest.org/console/?page=daily_digest (sign-in required). The online digest always includes all matched papers, sorted by potential impact, each with a one-sentence highlight for quick triage — and one click away from related papers, patents, and grants, the AI reader, and Save to Library.

The two paper sections run on different clocks, by design. Daily papers are papers just released, sorted by potential impact the moment they appear — hours after release, before anyone can know how they will be received. Trending papers are drawn from the previous day's releases, because trending is a judgment that takes a day of social and online data to accumulate. The two confirm each other: many of one day's top daily papers show up as the next day's trending papers — the impact ranking spotting them a day before the crowd does.

Short on time? That is exactly what the sorting is for. If you only have time for three papers, read the top three — they are chosen to be the best use of those minutes. For a high-level catch-up, the daily and weekly reviews summarize the most impactful papers across your fields in about five minutes. And when a paper is worth keeping, save it to your library as you go: that habit is the starting point of a shareable reading list or researcher profile.

Your interests will evolve — new project, new collaborator, new field. When they do, return to Account | Update Interests and adjust; changes take effect from the next digest. Two minutes of setup, revisited a few times a year, is all it takes to stay current with research without drowning in it.