Academic Sequitur has at least three advantages. First, we save you the trouble of having to sign up separately for each journal’s table of contents. Second, we make it easy to filter out articles that are not relevant to your interests. In any given week, dozens of academic papers are published in each discipline, and we don’t think it’s a good use of your time to manually sift through all of them. Finally, in some disciplines, journals are sometimes called “graveyards for papers” due to long publication lags. We bring you working, forthcoming and published papers so that you’re always on the cutting edge of research.

While there are other tools for staying up-to-date on research, Academic Sequitur gives you unprecedented control. We don’t use a black-box article selection algorithm, which could inadvertently omit some articles you care about or include articles that are not relevant to you. We also make it very clear which outlets we track, which can sometimes be hard to tell with other tools. With Academic Sequitur, you control what you see and when you see it.

Some highly multidisciplinary journals, like Nature Communications, specify the field of each published article. When article fields are available for a majority of articles in a multidisciplinary journal, we create “subjournals” for each field, e.g., Nature Communications (Mathematics and Computing), Nature Communications (Social Sciences), Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) – Evolution. When you subscribe to a subjournal, you will only receive articles that the publisher has classified as belonging to that topic. This feature makes it easier for our users to avoid irrelevant articles. Although Nature and Science provide fields for some articles, the coverage is not comprehensive enough for us to create subjournals for these two journals.

No. Our goal is to help you identify relevant research. We leave accessing it up to you (we’ll give you the link and abstract, of course). If you’re at an academic institution, you probably have free access to most of the journal articles. In addition, authors often post ungated copies of their articles on their homepages.

We post whatever abstracts we find, so if you do not see an abstract in your email or on our website, that means the article does not have one on the publisher’s website. Often, this is because an article is forthcoming and its abstract has not yet been posted. But don’t worry, we’ll keep checking for the abstract. If one appears, you will be notified about the article again, with the abstract included. In some cases, we are able to find an abstract for the article from another source (for example, a working paper series). In that case, we will note that the abstract is from a different source and may not match the final published abstract exactly.

Developing and maintaining the website takes time and money. And we don’t want to rely on advertising or on selling users’ information to sustain Academic Sequitur. You would probably not want that either. We think it’s well-worth the $1.99/month.

Maybe! We certainly think Academic Sequitur increases users’ research productivity. We suggest you check with your department.

Our founder is Tatyana Deryugina, an Associate Professor at the University of Illinois, who has personally experienced the struggle of keeping up with relevant research.