Built Morning Research Digest That Saved My Team 12 Hours Weekly 🔥

🔥

We were doing research wrong.😱

Every Monday morning, 4 of us would independently search ArXiv, Google Scholar, and Semantic Scholar for papers on AI automation and document processing. 3 hours each. 12 hours total team time.

Then we'd compare notes and realize we'd all found the same 7-8 papers.

Complete duplication of effort.

THE BREAKING POINT:

One Monday, our lead researcher was sick. We had a client call Tuesday needing current research on AI extraction methods. Nobody had done the Monday search. We looked unprepared.

"We can't keep doing research this way. There has to be a better system."

WHAT I BUILT:

n8n workflow that runs daily at 8 AM:

SCHEDULE TRIGGER - Fires every morning before team arrives

ACADEMIC SEARCH NODE - Searches ArXiv, Google Scholar, Semantic Scholar simultaneously for "AI automation document processing" papers

PROCESS RESULTS - Extracts paper data from API responses

VALIDATION FILTER - Ensures paper has abstract (>50 words), PDF link, and author information (removes incomplete entries)

LIMIT TO TOP 5 - Selects most relevant papers only

GOOGLE SHEETS INTEGRATION - Logs to spreadsheet with: Title, Authors, Abstract, PDF link, Citation count, Source, Year, Date added

SLACK NOTIFICATION - Sends formatted morning digest to #research channel

The whole workflow took 30 minutes to set up.

THE RESULTS:

Team arrives each morning to curated research digest. Zero manual search time. Everyone sees same papers. Complete metadata automatically captured in spreadsheet.

From 12 hours weekly search → 45 minutes weekly review.

Found 3 papers in last 4 months that directly influenced client projects. Would've missed them with old manual approach because they were published Thursday afternoon (we only searched Mondays).

CURRENT STATUS:

Been running 4 months. Zero maintenance required. Google Sheet now has 480+ papers with full metadata. Searchable knowledge base that grows automatically. Easy to export to CSV or analyze.

Team actually reads MORE papers now. Discovery friction removed.

THE INSIGHT:

Most people automate paper summarization. The real bottleneck is DISCOVERY.

Academic databases have APIs designed for exactly this. We just weren't using them.

SETUP IS SIMPLE:

Google Sheets makes this beginner-friendly. Just create a sheet, paste 10 column headers (title, authors, source, year, citations, doi, paperURL, pdfURL, abstract, addedDate), and connect the workflow. No complex database properties to configure.

TEMPLATES : n8n Integration

Are you spending analyst time on discovery tasks that should run automatically overnight?

11 comments