Weekly Slack digest of papers from researchers you track

Every Monday at 8am, run an agent workflow that monitors my Notion watchlist of named researchers and labs for new papers and posts a single ranked Slack digest.

Step 1. Pull the watchlist from Notion. I keep a database called 'Watched researchers' where each row has the researcher's name, their affiliation, an ORCID when I know it, and a short note explaining why I care about them. Use Notion's Query a Data Source operation (not the deprecated Query a Database) to load every active row.

Step 2. For each researcher, call Crossref Search Works with query.author set to their name. When I've recorded an ORCID, add filter=orcid:<orcid> for precision. Always add filter=from-pub-date:<one week ago today> to scope results to the last 7 days. Include my mailto on every Crossref request so we stay in the polite pool.

Step 3. Dedupe against my 'Papers seen' Notion database before doing any further work. That database stores the DOI on every row, so skip anything whose DOI is already logged. This is how next week's run knows what to skip and how we avoid re-posting.

Step 4. For each genuinely new paper, call Crossref Get Work by DOI to fetch the full metadata: title, full author list, container-title (journal), publish date, abstract, and URL.

Step 5. For each new paper, draft a 2 to 3 sentence 'why this matters' blurb that ties the abstract back to the watchlist note I wrote for that author. Be specific. Name the actual connection, not a generic summary of the paper.

Step 6. Post a single Slack message using Send a Message to the channel I configure. Group the digest into two sections, 'Directly competitive' and 'Tangential', based on how closely each paper aligns with my note about that researcher. Within each section, rank by recency. For every paper include the title, authors, journal, publish date, a DOI link, the matched watchlist researcher, and the relevance blurb. Use Slack mrkdwn formatting.

Step 7. Append every new paper to my 'Papers seen' Notion database using Create a Page, with properties for title, authors, journal, DOI, publish date, the relevance blurb, and which watched researcher it was matched to. This is the log next week's run reads in Step 3.

Edge cases. If a watched researcher has no new papers, skip them silently. If none of the watched researchers had new work this week, post a one-line 'no new papers from your watchlist this week' Slack message instead of an empty digest, and don't write anything to the Papers seen log.