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p/outreadRead digestible summaries of top research articles
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Kevin William David

Outread - Read digestible summaries of top research articles

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Want to keep updated on different fields of research? Read short summaries of research articles, carefully curated by experts on trending topics in simple language. Don't be opinionated, get informed with Outread.

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Janhvi Sirohi
Maker
Hey, fellow Product Hunters! Before we go on, we’d like to thank @kevin for hunting Outread. I’m Janhvi, co-founder at Outread. We’ve often come across this problem where we want to learn more about the latest findings in different fields of research but either don’t have the time or the prerequisite background to understand half the terminologies. 📕 On Outread, we take popular and credible research articles on different subjects and provide summaries for them in simple and easy to understand English, summarised by experts. ⏰ Stop spending a lot of time searching for relevant articles in the world of research, especially when most are behind a hefty paywall. 👨 Our target audience - research enthusiasts, journalists and especially students who want to speed up their research process for various topics. 🧬 In addition, we want to popularise the idea of being up to date with what’s happening in the field of research. 🏅 We use altmetric scores to find the best articles from among different fields. So, if you’re the curious type and want to learn answers to questions like what is the future of covid or when would we be making our first contact with aliens, then this is the product for you. You can head to our website to try out our free reads for the week or purchase a membership to get access to all articles. We have a limited time offer for our Product Hunt members where you can access all articles for $5/month. Cancel anytime. You can also submit research articles that you’d like to be summarised and uploaded to the website and join us on Slack channel - https://join.slack.com/t/outread... for monthly discussion on the articles. We’d love everyone’s feedback on this beta version and will continue to improve the product as we continue to learn. Thanks everyone and happy reading!
Firas Abboud
@kevin @janhvi_sirohi2 As a research professor, I find this to be so wonderful and necessary! Congratulations on the launch!
Janhvi Sirohi
Maker
@firas_abboud We're glad to see that you see the potential in this, thank you!
Naveed Rehman
hi, this is an interesting start up. i am yet trying to understand how would you scale it up. like you said, the experts are writing for you. i am just wondering for how long would they be doing it coz there are literally thousands of articles published every year. and there are hundreds of fields of interests... anyways, may be its just me. also, the abstracts (which are always free) serves the same purpose (to some extent but that's kind of satisfactory to most of researchers). i saw an squeezed article at your site. my understanding was, it would be more like a news article, like on solar-pv magazine where they use entirely different (and more interesting) way of showing articles' insights. more like news. but your articles are still written in academic style. i would suggest you to change that.
Anshika Singh
Maker
@naveed_rehman Hello Naveed, thanks for the feedback! you’ve raised some valid points and hope we can clarify some of them - 1) We’ll continue to scale as we grow (hiring more experts etc.). Our goal is not to summarise all articles but bring the most trending and most popular research articles from different fields. Not all articles are credible, so it also doesn’t make sense to focus on them. We use Altmetric scores to decide which articles need to be summarised. 2) The abstracts merely provide a starting point to the article but we cover the entirety of the article including methodology, discussions, results and conclusions made from the experiments. Usually, these are not included in the abstract. 3) There are already plenty of news sites that talk about articles but usually, there’s also bias when presented in such a manner. Which is why we focus on retaining the original structure so our readers know exactly what was discussed in detail in the original. There is minimal input and therefore, bias from our end. It’s a simplified version of the research article. 4) We are also in the process of introducing a system where our readers can request certain topics and articles, all of which would also be added to our archive. Thank you once again for the feedback and we’ll take it into consideration. Hope these points have cleared some of the doubts.😊
Naveed Rehman
thanks and good luck!
Anshika Singh
Maker
Hello Product Hunters! 👋 Before I start, I’d like to thank @kevin for hunting our product! I’m Anshika and I’m a co-founder of Outread. Nice to meet you! 😄 My fellow co-founder @janhvi_sirohi2 has already explained in detail how the product works and I’ll talk a bit about my personal experience. When I was in university while doing research🧬 for assignments I wondered many times if I could just read the gist of all the topics an article has covered and not just the abstract so I could determine better if I should invest the approximate 20-30 minutes it takes to read one, including reading through the jargon and searching any terms I didn’t understand. Other times, I have come across articles that are behind a hefty paywall💸 and, there is no way for me to know if the information would be worth it for me so, a summary in simple terms would have helped a lot. Not just me but many of my peers had faced the same issues, especially the international students whose first language isn't English. I have tried using AI software that auto-generates summaries but most of the time I would get something that wasn't really that coherent and lacked context. Expansion of abbreviations and definitions for technical terms was also missing. So, something written by an expert would have helped which is how we are trying to operate as at Outread. But, even outside of university sometimes I would get curious about a topic and just want to read up if there was any research on it and how it developed but didn't have the time to read through the long text! If some of these problems resonate with you or you're just interested in staying up-to-date with the latest research I hope you would enjoy using Outread! We're still in the beta and are constantly working and expanding. We're excited to share our product with you and will greatly appreciate your feedback! 🙌
Reuben Carter
Nice !