This week's update introduces new platform capabilities for both understanding and tracking research. We are testing a feature that changes how you can see an overview of each article. You will also find a new tool that provides a consistent, time-based look at your unit's publication history.

We are experimenting with a new feature that generates an intermediate "summary landing page" for each new research article. When viewing the newsletter, a reader is invited to either click a link to the view the expanded summary, or jump straight to the full article. All existing links (such as clicking on the article "title question" or the article image) continue to link directly to the full article.

The purpose of this feature is to increase the readability of the research for any audiences and readers who may not be familiar or comfortable with the technicalities of academic writing. The summary defines terms, weeds out jargon, and summarizes for clarity.

The other function of the feature is to allow the newsletter to "say more" about each article, without substantially adding more material to each issue. As always, we assume that readers "skim" content—and so we need to keep it as "skimmable" as possible.

The summary pages are also designed to be sharable on social platforms (if the social sharing setting is enabled), which provides a super streamlined way to use the article "headline question" and generated image on other platforms.

Thanks to everyone who contributed the feedback and ideas that culminated in this experimental feature!

There are some limitations. Because of copyright, research※mesh only uses open and public metadata to generate this summary. This means the summary page does not take the full article text into account, which can limit the depth and scope of the generated overview. Additionally, in an effort to faithfully and thoroughly represent the research, summary overviews will typically lean more towards capturing as many details possible in most cases.

Please let us know what you think of this feature. Is it helpful in your space? See areas for improvement? Would you use it in the context of the research community you support? Would you prefer the option to disable it? (Please feel free to invite feedback from your researchers, too.) Tell us what you think at info@researchmesh.com

Once a newsletter has been indexing your research unit's publications for a while, new issues will begin including a "last month's publications" link near the footer, which currently links out to a simple list of publications (in the selected citation format of your configuration).

Whether a newsletter is set to weekly or monthly delivery, the "last month" publication list is scoped to the previous calendar month. This provides a more "time oriented" snapshot of publications within a consistent reporting window, which can be used to support other "behind the scenes" administrative tasks in the research support space.

This feature also provides a way to both "double feature" publications that have already been showcased in past issues and to ensure that publications with outlier metadata (the "our bots will try again" scenario) are still captured in a timely fashion for administrative purposes.

Past month reporting is organized by the date that research※mesh first "discovers" an article. We adopt this standard to provide a consistent reporting criteria month-to-month, even though official publication timelines can be complex and sporadic across publishers. A single article can have multiple associated dates: from its initial preprint, to its formal acceptance after peer review, to its "online first" or "author approved" version, and finally to its full, typeset inclusion in a journal issue as the Version of Record (VoR). These stages can be months apart. By using our index date as the reporting criteria, we aim provide a consistent and timely snapshot of research output.

We have some more features in the works that are especially designed to support administrative and reporting workflows. The core functionality of the research※mesh retrieval engine provides substantial, structured metadata, which opens many opportunities for streamlining and automating more administrative workloads. Stay tuned! 😎

And thanks for being an amazing beta test team! 🫶