Thanks for your interests in Paper Digest! Below are the frequently asked questions by our users and we try to update as needed.
User inputs a DOI or PDF url in the search box, and PD will try to fetch, parse, and summarize the article. It only works if the article is Open Access.
Digital Object Identifier or DOI is a standardized alphanumeric code starting with “10…” assigned to most of academic articles. Clicking on a DOI will resolve to full text or at least to a page with the article abstract.
A PDF url is what you see in your browser address bar when viewing a PDF article Below are not valid PDF urls:
For PD to successfully generate a digest, the article has to be Open Access. PD looks at the license type, and the full text either in XML or PDF format. Even when the article is open, PD may or may not work successfully because each publisher has different conventions in their file format. The table below summarizes our general experience, and we will continue to improve PD so we can accommodate more publishers/journals.
The performance of PD largely depends of the file size being summarized. Bigger files will take longer to process.
It might be.
Currently PD is trained based on common headers we see in academic articles, such as Introduction, Data and Methods, Results, Discussion, and Conclusion etc. With articles that do not include such common headers, PD might struggle a bit. We are working ways to improve this.
When a PDF url is provided, PD will do its best to read it. Some old PDFs (typically OCR-processed via scanned image) might just not have the complete text to be processed by PD.
Depending on the nature of errors, you will receive either of the following error messages:
"Sorry, it does not look like a DOI or PDF url"
The DOI or PDF url you provided was invalid, incorrect, possibly mistyped so we couldn’t find the document.
“Sorry, seems that is not an open access article”
The document you requested was found but it wasn’t open access. Read more: Which publishers/journals does PD work?
“Sorry, the file is unsupported”
The DOI or PDF url was associated with a file that comes in a format we cannot handle yet. Read more: Which publishers/journals does PD work? and I put a DOI of an Open Access article, but PD failed to summarize it. What happened?
No. The API is now deprecated.