Communication Paper Picnic

A basket with the latest published research in communication and a grabbag from related fields. This is an adaptation of a project by Moritz Marbach.

The crawler lives in the main branch of the backend while the website is rendered from the gh-pages branch.

Setup

After forking the repository, you need to make some changes to the repository settings for it to function properly.

1. Go to Settings > Actions > General. Scroll down to Workflow permissions and allow workflows to read and write in the repository.

2. Go to Security > Secrets and Variables > Actions. Set the following repository secrets:

   • CROSSREF_EMAIL - Your email for the Crossref API (polite pool)
   • OPENAI_APIKEY - OpenAI API key for article classification
   • GEMINI_APIKEY - Google Gemini API key for must-read selection
   • BUTTONDOWN_API_KEY - (Optional) Buttondown API key for email digests

Email Digests (Optional)

The project supports sending email digests via Buttondown. Subscribers can choose their preferred frequency (daily, weekly, or monthly).

Setting up Buttondown

1. Create a Buttondown account and get your API key from Settings > API
2. Add BUTTONDOWN_API_KEY to your GitHub repository secrets
3. Enable tags in Buttondown: Settings > Basics > Tags
4. Enable subscriber autonomy: Settings > Subscribing > Autonomy

Subscriber Tags

Create the following tags in Buttondown for subscriber preferences:

Frequency tags (subscribers choose one):

• freq-daily - Daily digest
• freq-weekly - Weekly digest (recommended default)
• freq-monthly - Monthly digest

Discipline tags (subscribers can choose multiple):

• disc-communication - Communication journals
• disc-politics - Political science journals
• disc-po - Public opinion journals
• disc-psych - Psychology journals
• disc-sociology - Sociology journals
• disc-multidisciplinary - Multidisciplinary journals (Nature, Science, PNAS, etc.)
• disc-preprints - Preprints from OSF servers
• disc-mustread - AI-curated must-read picks

Signup Form

You can configure your Buttondown signup form to let subscribers self-select their preferences using the Portal feature. Add form inputs for frequency and disciplines.

Example signup URL with default tags:

https://buttondown.com/your-newsletter?tag=freq-weekly&tag=disc-communication&tag=disc-mustread

Manual Trigger

You can manually trigger email sends from the Actions tab:

1. Go to Actions > send_email
2. Click "Run workflow"
3. Select frequency tier and optionally enable dry run mode

Schedule

The email workflow runs daily at 3 AM UTC (after the 2 AM crawl):

• Daily subscribers: Receive emails every day
• Weekly subscribers: Receive emails on Mondays
• Monthly subscribers: Receive emails on the 1st of each month