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

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We were doing research wrong.

Every Monday morning, 4 of us would independently search ArXiv, Google Scholar, and PubMed 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 6 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 published in last 24 hours

DATE FILTER - Code node that validates papers are actually from last 24 hours (some databases have lag)

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

LIMIT TO TOP 5 - Selects highest-cited papers only

NOTION INTEGRATION - Creates database page with: Title, Authors, Abstract, PDF link, Citation count, Source, Publication date

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.

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. Notion database now has 480+ papers with full metadata. Searchable knowledge base that grows automatically.

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.

WORKFLOW TEMPLATE:

Complete n8n workflow Json file available here

Includes all the validation logic and filtering code. You can import it directly and customize for your research topics.

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

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