Catalog and summarize papers dropped into Drive
An n8n workflow extracts metadata from new PDFs, finds related papers on Semantic Scholar and PubMed, builds an APA citation, logs to Sheets and creates a Notion summary.
Done withn8n
- What they did
- A Google Drive trigger fires when a PDF lands in a folder, and the workflow downloads it. The PDF Vector community node extracts metadata, abstract, study type and findings. It then searches Semantic Scholar and PubMed using the top 3 keywords, builds an APA citation, appends a row to Google Sheets, and creates a Notion page.
- How it went
- Each paper takes about 20-30 seconds. The author reports about 98% metadata accuracy on digital PDFs, about 90% on study type, and about 85% on scanned papers. Niche topics may return only 3-5 related papers.
- Worth knowing
- It needs self-hosted n8n. PDF Vector costs about 4-5 credits per paper, so the free 100 credits cover roughly 20-25 papers a month. Check the APA citations before using them.
Try it yourself with n8n
Build an n8n workflow that triggers when a new PDF lands in my [Google Drive folder], extracts the title, authors, year and abstract, finds 3-5 related papers on Semantic Scholar and PubMed, and builds an APA citation. Log everything in a Google Sheet and create a Notion page with a plain-language summary and the related papers. Done when one test PDF produces a sheet row and a Notion page, which you show me.
Source: community.n8n.io · Undated
Five of these in your inbox every morning
The best things people got an AI agent to do, each with the prompt to try it.
More like this
Draft email replies and LinkedIn posts with n8n workflows
The author built n8n workflows that draft Gmail replies for approval, generate LinkedIn posts from a topic, and extract tasks from emails into Google Tasks or Notion.
Handle routine email tasks and follow-up reminders with a personal assistant
Author built an n8n personal assistant that handles about 70% of routine email tasks and sends reminders for tasks waiting on others, after fixing early quirks.
Track daily arXiv papers into a Notion database
An n8n workflow fetches arXiv papers daily for a keyword, summarizes them with Gemini 2.5 Flash, writes them to Notion and sends Feishu and Gmail notifications.
Find connections across 100 non-fiction books
Claude Code browses a personal library with CLI tools and surfaces trails of related excerpts across books.
Build searchable knowledge bases from videos and papers
An OpenClaw agent runs a YouTube summariser and a paper-condensing tool, saving Markdown into two indexed knowledge bases for videos and papers.
Turn voice notes into structured Obsidian notes
Voice notes sent over Telegram become Obsidian thought notes with transcript, cleaned argument, linked context and a draft; Hermes also tracks recipes.