Novasieve

User Guide & Overview

Find the research that matters. See it as it is.

Novasieve keeps watch on the scientific literature for you and shows you the facts about every paper — where it came from, who wrote it, how often it's cited — drawn straight from the scholarly record. Never invented, never guessed.

01

What Novasieve is

Staying current is a full-time job: papers arrive faster than anyone can read them, and the details that decide whether a paper is worth your time are scattered across databases. Novasieve does the watching, gathering, and fact-checking so you can spend your time on the reading that counts.

Track the topics you care about and Novasieve gathers new papers on a schedule. Search across many scholarly sources at once. Keep what matters in a personal library. And for every paper, see the grounded facts — authors, journal, year, funders, citation counts — without wading through the original PDF first.

✓

We never write summaries or put words in an author's mouth. Everything you see is a real field pulled from an open scholarly database — a title, an author list, a journal, a year, a citation count. There is no AI paraphrase standing between you and the source.

When a number can't be verified, we say so plainly rather than filling the gap with a confident-sounding guess. Relevance is shown as a band, not a false percentage; citation figures are labelled for what they are.

It's built for the people who live in the literature: researchers keeping abreast of a field, students finding their footing, and lab teams who'd rather not rebuild the same reading list five times over.

02

Getting started

Three steps to your first digest. No installation — Novasieve runs in your browser, on your phone or laptop.

Create your free account

Sign in with your email. You'll get a secure link — no password to remember. A free account lets you track topics and preview results right away.

Add your first topic

Give Novasieve a few keywords for an area you follow — the more specific, the better. This becomes a standing watch on the literature.

Open your first digest

Novasieve checks its sources and assembles recent papers on your topic. Skim, save the ones worth keeping, and you're up and running.

Free to start. Pro unlocks the full toolkit: $5/month or $51/year.
03

Core features

Ten things Novasieve does for you. Each one is grounded in the real scholarly record — nothing here is generated or paraphrased.

Tracked Topics

A standing watch on your field

Benefit

New papers come to you. Instead of running the same search every week, you set a topic once and Novasieve keeps checking for you.

How

Create a topic with a few keywords. Novasieve gathers recent papers on a schedule and collects them into a digest you can open any time.

Narrow it

A topic can be limited to a kind of work — reviews when you want the field summarised, or research articles when you want the primary record. Only OpenAlex records what kind of thing a paper is, so while that filter is on the other sources pause, and Novasieve names which ones. Fewer results that mean what they say.

Discover

Search many sources at once

Benefit

One search reaches across a dozen scholarly sources, so you're not hopping between databases to be sure you haven't missed something.

How

Type a query and browse the results. Each is marked High, Medium, or Low relevance — an honest band, not a made-up match percentage.

Library

Keep what matters in one place

Benefit

The papers you'll return to, saved and searchable — not lost in a browser tab or a folder of downloads.

How

Choose Add to library on any paper in any list. Have a reference already? Add it by its DOI and Novasieve fills in the details for you.

Structured Data

Clean facts, not paragraphs

Benefit

Get a paper's key details as tidy, reliable fields — title, authors, journal, year, DOI — ready to scan or reuse, with no AI paraphrase in between.

How

Open a paper's data view. Every field is pulled straight from the source record, so what you copy is what was actually published.

Deep Analysis

See where a paper comes from

Benefit

Judge a paper's context before you invest in it: the institutions behind it, the countries and funders involved, and how much it's been cited.

How

Open Research origin on any paper. Citation figures come from an open database and are labelled as such — we never show a licensed impact factor we can't stand behind.

Institutional Access

Reach the papers your library already pays for

Benefit

A paper marked Paid usually isn't paid for by you — your institution has very likely already bought it. Instead of ending the trail at a paywall, Novasieve can hand the citation to your own library and let it open the door.

How

Open Edit profile and fill in Library link resolver with your institution's resolver address — something shaped like https://your-library.edu/openurl. Paywalled papers then carry a Get it via your library link that takes you to your library's own record for that paper. Not sure of the address? Search your library's site for “link resolver” or “OpenURL”, or ask a librarian — they will know it immediately.

Good to know

This is the OpenURL standard (ANSI/NISO Z39.88-2004), so it works with the resolvers institutions already run — SFX, Alma / Primo, WorldCat, 360 Link — rather than only the ones we have integrated with. The address must start with https, because it carries which paper you are trying to read and that is nobody else's business on the way. The link is offered only on papers that are not already free — when an open-access copy exists it wins, being fewer clicks and no login.

Alerts

Know the moment something changes

Benefit

Be told when a new paper lands on a topic you follow, when a paper you're watching gets cited, or when one is corrected or retracted — so you're never citing stale work.

How

Turn on notifications in your inbox. Email alerts are yours to switch on and are off by default — you decide what reaches your inbox.

Where to Publish

Find the right journal — cost first

Benefit

See journals that genuinely publish work like yours, with free-to-publish options sorted to the top so cost never sneaks up on you.

How

Paste your abstract or keywords. Each suggested journal shows a Fit figure — a ratio of real publication counts, not a model's opinion — and whether it's open-access or subscription.

Find a Researcher

Find the right people, ORCID or not

Benefit

Track down scholars in your area — potential collaborators, reviewers, or the authority on a method — even when they don't have an ORCID.

How

Search by name, topic, or institution, then refine by field or UN Sustainable Development Goal. Every researcher is reachable through their public profile; an ORCID is a bonus, never a requirement.

Teams

Work the literature together

Benefit

Your lab shares one set of topics, one library, and one thread of comments — no more forwarding links or rebuilding each other's searches.

How

Create a team, invite your members, and share topics or papers. Comments let you discuss a paper in place, right where the group is already working.

Good to know

Teams are part of Pro. Every member needs Pro of their own or one of the team’s paid seats, which the team’s owner buys under Team seats. A paid seat gives that member everything Pro gives, for as long as they hold it; when it ends they return to Free, or to their own Pro.

Subgroups

Give each project its own space

Benefit

A lab is rarely working on one thing. Subgroups let Methanotrophs, Sequence pipelines and Field data each keep their own papers and their own discussion, so nobody wades through three projects' worth of updates to find their own. You can belong to as many as you like, or none.

How

Inside a team, create a subgroup and choose who can join it: Open (any lab member walks in), Restricted (visible to the lab, but a lead approves who joins), or Private (hidden from everyone except its members). Whoever creates a subgroup leads it, and leads can hand that role to anyone else.

Flip in and out

The subgroup bar switches you between projects in one click and shows what is new in each. For any open subgroup you choose how you take part: Active to post and share, Observing to follow the reading without joining the conversation, or Muted to stay a member and stop being notified. Muting never changes what you are allowed to do — a muted lead is still a lead.

Good to know

A subgroup's papers and comments are visible only to people entitled to see them, and that is enforced by the database rather than by hiding things in the interface. The team's main feed stays available for anything the whole lab should see. Joining a subgroup does not mark its whole history unread — you start from the day you join.

Triage

Sort a week's reading in one pass

Benefit

Going through a digest is a three-way decision, not a two-way one: read now, read later, or discard. Without a middle option everything you meant to come back to gets saved alongside everything you decided to keep, and the distinction you were drawing disappears.

How

Each paper offers Save, Screen later and Not relevant. The screen-later pile has its own count and its own view, so it is a place you can return to rather than a note to yourself.

Good to know

A deferred paper counts as not yet screened, so it never appears as included or excluded in a PRISMA diagram, and review exports carry no verdict for it. That is what it is.

Dual review

Screen twice, blind, and measure agreement

Benefit

A systematic review usually wants two people screening independently, and a number for how often they agreed. That number only means something if neither could see the other's calls.

How

On a topic shared with a team, the reader who created it turns on Dual review and chooses the subgroup that adjudicates. Its members screen as usual and cannot see each other's decisions. A lead of that subgroup sees Agreement between reviewers: Cohen's κ and the papers judged differently, with the reviewers shown as Reviewer A and Reviewer B.

Good to know

The lead must not have screened the topic. One recorded decision, even Screen later, hides the reviewers' decisions until it is withdrawn, which keeps the review blind. The lead can read but never change anyone's call, and there is not yet a place to record an agreed consensus verdict: PRISMA and the exports count each reader's own decisions.

Follow a Researcher

Follow the people, not just the words

Benefit

A few of the right researchers surface most of what matters in a field, without the flood a broad keyword produces. You already knew whose work to read; now you do not have to go looking for it.

How

Open a researcher and choose Follow. When they publish, it arrives in your notifications. Following means “tell me what they do next” — it will not fill your inbox with a thirty-year back catalogue.

Momentum

See what is gaining traction

Benefit

When you have an hour rather than a morning, the useful question is not “what is new” but “what is moving”. A paper picking up citations quickly is often worth the hour ahead of a newer one that is not.

How

Below your feed, papers from every topic you watch are ranked by citations gained per week. It measures speed, not size, so a smaller paper climbing beats a famous one standing still.

Good to know

Speed needs a paper to have been read twice, so a newly watched topic has little to show at first — the panel says how much it can measure rather than implying nothing is happening. Rate is raw, and fields cite at very different speeds, so the field-comparison chip beside a paper is what makes a slow-field result legible next to a fast-field one.

Coverage

Divide the watch, and hand papers over properly

Benefit

In a group, the way reading stays manageable is that each person owns a narrow area. The thing no lab can see unaided is the area everyone assumed someone else had.

How

Each subgroup can name who is watching it, and the panel leads with the areas nobody is — plus a warning when one person is carrying too many. Naming a watcher records accountability only; it does not change what anyone can see or do.

Handing over

When you share a paper with your team you can add a sentence on why it matters and a suggested next step — read it, try the method, cite it, or bring it to a meeting. The sentence is yours: Novasieve never writes it for you, because what your colleagues need is your judgement, which is the one thing a machine cannot supply.

Export

Take your references anywhere

Benefit

Move your reading into a manuscript, a reference manager, or a spreadsheet without retyping a thing.

How

Export citations in common styles or as structured data. We label formatted citations approximate — always give them a final check before submission.

04

How Novasieve decides what to show you

The rules below are the whole product. They are written here so you can check them, and so you know what Novasieve will never do.

✓

Nothing is written by a machine. Every title, author list, journal, year, DOI and abstract you see is a stored field copied from an open scholarly database. Novasieve does not summarise papers, paraphrase authors, or generate text about research. If a sentence appears under a paper, an author wrote it.

Novasieve stores and displays abstracts and metadata only — never full text, and every item carries its source and a resolvable DOI.

05

Getting the most out of it

A few habits that make Novasieve pay off faster.