Since I joined MongoDB’s Distributed Systems Research Group a few years ago, I’ve relied on Google Scholar alerts to tell me when an author in my specialty publishes a new paper, or (much more often) when a new paper cites an author I’m interested in. Google Scholar can send me email alerts, but their frequency isn’t configurable: daily only. And if the same new paper is included in multiple alerts (e.g., it cites several authors I follow), Google Scholar won’t deduplicate it. It’s common for to get a half-dozen emails in the morning about an overlapping set of papers.

I’ve made a little Google Apps Script automation that solves these problems for me. Now, I’ve configured a GMail filter so my daily Google Scholar alerts skip my inbox and don’t bother me. Once a week, my script summarizes and deduplicates all the alerts, then deletes them from my GMail archive. This turned a daily chore of cleaning up my inbox into a much easier weekly chore: skimming the titles of this week’s papers, in a single email.

Image by Edward Bird.