What is Novarum Scholar?

Novarum Scholar is an AI-powered academic research alert service. It monitors five major scholarly databases every day, identifies newly published papers matching a user's chosen research keywords, and delivers personalized email digests with AI-written plain-language summaries of each paper.

The service is built for researchers who need to stay current with the academic literature in their field but cannot manually check journals, preprint servers, and databases every day. Novarum Scholar does the scanning, deduplication, and summarization automatically, then delivers results on a schedule the user controls.

AI summaries are generated using Claude (Anthropic). Open-access papers are labeled with OA badges. Preprints from arXiv, bioRxiv, and medRxiv are clearly marked as unreviewed. Duplicate papers across databases are suppressed — each paper appears only once.

Who is it for?

• PhD students tracking new publications in their dissertation topic
• Postdoctoral researchers following niche or rapidly evolving subfields
• Clinicians and medical professionals monitoring clinical trial results and treatment literature
• Academic faculty keeping up with their field while managing teaching and administration
• Industry researchers tracking competitive landscape and regulatory science
• Science journalists and policy analysts covering emerging research areas
• Librarians supporting faculty and student research needs
• Anyone who relies on academic literature and cannot afford to miss important papers

How it works

1. User creates a free account at novarumscholar.com/signup — no credit card required.
2. User enters one or more research keywords (e.g., "mRNA vaccines", "large language models", "climate feedback loops").
3. User selects a delivery schedule: once a week, up to three times a week, daily, or instant (Pro plan).
4. Every day, Novarum Scholar queries five academic databases for papers published in the past 24–48 hours matching those keywords.
5. Results are deduplicated across all five sources — each unique paper appears only once.
6. Claude generates a concise, accurate plain-language summary for each paper.
7. Papers are tagged: peer-reviewed vs. preprint, open access vs. paywalled.
8. A clean email digest is sent to the user on their chosen schedule with summaries and direct DOI/OA links.
9. Pro users also receive an immediate alert email when a new matching paper is detected, regardless of schedule.

What databases are monitored?

• OpenAlex — Open scholarly graph covering 250M+ works across all academic disciplines. Includes journal articles, books, conference papers, and dissertations.
• PubMed— NCBI's primary database for biomedical and life sciences literature. Covers MEDLINE and additional life science journals, approximately 35M+ citations.
• arXiv — The preprint server for physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, economics, statistics, and electrical engineering. Over 2M preprints.
• Europe PMC — Full-text biomedical and life science literature maintained by EMBL-EBI. Includes PubMed content plus preprints from bioRxiv, medRxiv, and others.
• Semantic Scholar — AI-powered research database covering 220M+ papers across all domains, with citation graph data and author disambiguation.

Pricing

All paid plans include a 14-day free trial. Free plan requires no credit card.

• Free $0 / forever
  • 1 keyword
  • 1× per week delivery
  • AI summaries included
  • No credit card required
• Scholar — $9/month
  • 1–4 keywords
  • Up to 3× per week delivery
  • AI summaries included
  • Author alerts
• Researcher — $19/month
  • 1–7 keywords
  • Daily delivery (Mon–Fri)
  • AI summaries included
  • Author alerts
  • Open access and preprint labels
• Pro — $24/month
  • 1–15 keywords
  • Daily delivery + instant alerts
  • AI summaries included
  • Author alerts
  • Open access and preprint labels
  • Real-time notifications when a matching paper is published

Full pricing comparison →

Key differentiators

Compared to existing research alert tools:

• vs. Google Scholar Alerts: Novarum covers 5 databases vs. 1. Includes AI summaries. Deduplicates results. Labels preprints. Delivers on a user-controlled schedule.
• vs. PubMed email alerts: PubMed-only vs. 5 databases. No summaries in PubMed alerts. Novarum consolidates all results into one digest.
• vs. ResearchGate notifications: ResearchGate is a social network; Novarum is email-first with no social requirement. Novarum covers databases ResearchGate does not.
• vs. journal table-of-contents alerts: Journal TOC alerts cover one journal at a time. Novarum covers your keywords across all journals simultaneously.
• AI summaries:Competitors provide titles and abstracts. Novarum generates fresh plain-language summaries of each paper's key finding, saving significant reading time.

Privacy & trust

• Email address is the only required account field.
• No user data is sold or shared with third parties. Ever.
• No tracking pixels in digest emails.
• Users can cancel, pause, or delete their account at any time.
• Paid subscriptions managed via Stripe — Novarum never stores payment details.

Get started

Novarum Scholar is free to start. No credit card required on the Free plan. Takes less than two minutes to set up your first keyword alert.

Questions? Contact us at hello@novarumscholar.com