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26d • General Discussion 💬
Built Academic Research Automation, Professor Thinks I'm Magic
Professor emails at 2 AM: "Need 200 citations for grant proposal. Due Thursday. Help?"
This is Dr. Sarah Chen, molecular biology, Harvard. Her grant applications get $2M+ funding. No pressure.
HER MANUAL NIGHTMARE
- Search 6 different academic databases
- Cross-reference citations
- Format in 3 different styles (APA, MLA, Chicago)
- Remove duplicates manually
- Verify impact factors
- Total time estimate: 40 hours
MY n8n SOLUTION (Built in 6 hours)
The Workflow Architecture (12 nodes):
- Google Sheets trigger → research topics input
- Multi-database search node (parallel): PubMed API; ArXiv search; Semantic Scholar; Google Scholar; ERIC database.
- Results aggregation and deduplication
- Citation impact factor lookup
- Automatic citation formatting (3 styles)
- Relevance scoring based on keywords
- Output to structured database
THE MAGIC MOMENT
Demo call Tuesday morning:"Input your 12 research topics here..."types topics in Google Sheet
3 minutes later:
- 847 relevant papers found
- Duplicates removed (312 eliminated)
- 535 unique citations
- All formatted in required styles
- Ranked by relevance and impact factor
Her reaction: "This is impossible. You built a research assistant."
WEDNESDAY DELIVERY
Final results:
- 200 top-ranked citations
- 3 formatting styles
- Impact factor analysis
- Relevance scores
- Export formats: BibTeX, EndNote, Zotero
Processing time: 8 minutes
Manual equivalent: 40 hours
Time saved: 39 hours 52 minutes
THE FOLLOW-UP PROJECT
"Can this monitor for new papers weekly?"
Added scheduled triggers:
- Monday search for new publications
- Automatic relevance filtering
- Weekly digest with top 10 papers
- Direct integration with her reference manager
SCALING THE MAGIC
Current setup serves:
- 8 professors across 4 universities
- 15,000+ papers processed monthly
- Average search time: 4.3 minutes
- Manual equivalent time saved: 320 hours/month
REVENUE BREAKDOWN
- Professor subscriptions: $600/month each
- Enterprise university licenses: $2,400/month
- Custom research workflows: $1,800 one-time
- Total monthly: $4,800
THE TEMPLATE STACK
Research Automation Workflow includes:
- Multi-database search logic
- Citation formatting algorithms
- Deduplication rules
- Impact factor integration
- Export format handlers
What's your most "impossible" automation that actually worked?
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Built Academic Research Automation, Professor Thinks I'm Magic
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