TrendMD in scientific articles

TrendMD’s recommendation engine uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) to connect ideas, subjects, and people. We help researchers discover new content related to their interests, within the context of their research workflow. Publishers use our service to grow their website traffic, build readership, find new users, and increase citations. With libraries reducing budgets for subscriptions amid greater availability of open access content, publishers are under greater pressure than ever to grow their audience and ensure that their content is finding its way to users who will value it the most. This paper includes research and case studies that demonstrate how TrendMD is helping publishers achieve their goals through enhanced discovery.

With 5,000 new peer-reviewed articles published across over 27,000 online journals every day, scholarly publishers face challenges in maintaining their critical roles as content curators and distributors. Unless you know what you are looking for, it has become virtually impossible for online readers to discover relevant content. Similarly, authors, industry publishers, and funders of scholarly content are finding it increasingly difficult to attain the reach and visibility necessary to generate impact.

1. With over 6,000 new peer-reviewed articles published daily, scholarly contentproviders face growing challenges of reaching their target audience.

2. There are few evidenced-based strategies for disseminating online scholarly contentto a targeted audience.

3. TrendMD increased weekly page views by 49% relative to baseline traffic for a groupof articles published in theJournal of Medical Internet Research.

4. Future studies are needed to determine how article page views correlate with otherarticle-level metrics such as Altmetric scores and citations.

Prior research shows that article reader counts (i.e. saves) on the online reference manager, Mendeley, correlate to future citations. There are currently no evidenced-based distribution strategies that have been shown to increase article saves on Mendeley. We conducted a 4-week randomized controlled trial to examine how promotion of article links in a novel online cross-publisher distribution channel (TrendMD) affect article saves on Mendeley. Four hundred articles published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research were randomized to either the TrendMD arm (n = 200) or the control arm (n = 200) of the study. Our primary outcome compares the 4-week mean Mendeley saves of articles randomized to TrendMD versus control. Articles randomized to TrendMD showed a 77% increase in article saves on Mendeley relative to control. The difference in mean Mendeley saves for TrendMD articles versus control was 2.7, 95% CI (2.63, 2.77), and statistically significant (p < 0.01). There was a positive correlation between pageviews driven by TrendMD and article saves on Mendeley (Spearman’s rho r = 0.60). This is the first randomized controlled trial to show how an online cross-publisher distribution channel (TrendMD) enhances article saves on Mendeley. While replication and further study are needed, these data suggest that cross-publisher article recommendations via TrendMD may enhance citations of scholarly articles.

There is currently a paucity of evidence‐based strategies that have been shown to increase citations of peer‐reviewed articles following their publication. We conducted a 12‐month randomized controlled trial to examine whether the promotion of article links in an online cross‐publisher distribution platform (TrendMD) affects citations. In all, 3,200 articles published in 64 peer‐reviewed journals across eight subject areas were block randomized at the subject level to either the TrendMD group (n = 1,600) or the control group (n = 1,600) of the study. Our primary outcome compares the mean citations of articles randomized to TrendMD versus control after 12 months. Articles randomized to TrendMD showed a 50% increase in mean citations relative to control at 12 months. The difference in mean citations at 12 months for articles randomized to TrendMD versus control was 5.06, 95% confidence interval [2.87, 7.25], was statistically significant (p < .001) and found in three of eight subject areas. At 6 months following publication, articles randomized to TrendMD showed a smaller, yet statistically significant (p = .005), 21% increase in mean citations, relative to control. To our knowledge, this is the first randomized controlled trial to demonstrate how an intervention can be used to increase citations of peer‐reviewed articles after they have been published.