About ChemShorts

A continuously updated discovery hub for chemistry, biochemistry and related sciences: daily Top 10, searchable paper feed and concise AI summaries.

Where papers come from

Several times a day we check Crossref (priority chemistry journals and ChemRxiv), OpenAlex (chemistry, chemical engineering, materials science and related fields across all journals, including multidisciplinary ones), PubMed, Europe PMC, bioRxiv and medRxiv. Priority chemistry journals, ChemRxiv and publisher feeds are checked every hour; the other sources every 4 hours. Upstream services publish metadata with their own delays, so a paper can appear here hours or days after it goes online, and complete coverage of every journal cannot be guaranteed.

One record per paper

Records from different databases are merged using DOIs, PubMed/PMC and repository identifiers, and careful title, author and date matching. Preprints are linked to their published journal versions rather than merged. Corrections and retractions are kept as separate records.

Summaries

Paper cards currently show the opening of each paper’s own abstract, as supplied by the indexing sources. AI-generated summaries may be introduced later.

When enabled, each summary is written by Claude (Anthropic) using only the paper’s title and abstract, and must pass automatic checks: it must be 50–60 words long, contain no numbers that are absent from the abstract, and avoid exaggerated language. Summaries can still contain errors or omit nuance — always read the original publication before relying on a result. Papers without a sufficiently detailed abstract are not summarised.

How the daily Top 10 is chosen

The Top 10 is a discovery aid, not a judgement of scientific quality or importance. Candidates are papers added in the last 48 hours. Each receives a transparent score from these weighted signals:

• Freshness (weight 1) — how recently it appeared.
• Chemistry relevance (weight 1.5) — how strongly its title, abstract and subject labels match our chemistry taxonomy.
• Novelty language (weight 0.8) — whether the authors describe the work as new (e.g. “first”, “new class”). This is self-reported and weakly informative.
• Methodological evidence (weight 0.8) — mentions of e.g. crystal structures, mechanistic or kinetic studies, in vivo validation or scale-up, where stated in the abstract.
• Abstract detail (weight 0.5) and open access (weight 0.2).

To keep the list diverse, at most 2 papers come from the same primary field and 2 from the same journal. Journal prestige and citation counts are not used. An editor may approve, reorder, replace or exclude papers. Each card’s “Why this paper?” panel shows its individual score components.

Graphical abstracts

Graphical abstracts come from two places. Where an article is openly licensed (for example CC BY) and its full text is in Europe PMC, the image is shown with credit to the authors. Otherwise, where a publisher includes the graphical abstract in its official journal RSS feed, the image is displayed directly from the publisher’s server with a credit to the publisher and a link to the original article; ChemShorts does not copy or store these images. Images are never generated or substituted. Publishers who prefer their images not to appear here can contact us and they will be removed.