Written by Nadia Kim (2026.01.13) (Contact: [email protected])

Hello! My name is Nadia, a Regional Planning PhD candidate at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. I’ve always wanted to have a newsletter system that helps me stay updated on recent publications from academic journals related to my research. A newsletter system that differs from a typical lit review, where I dig into my research topics. I wanted to get myself familiar with what is going on and what is being discussed in my field recently. Browsing a journal article’s publisher website does one job, but I thought there must be a way to do this more efficiently.

So, with the help of ChatGPT and my husband, Seonghwan, who studies computer science, I made a system that automatically collects journal article abstracts and organizes them into a .md file within Obsidian. After talking to some fellow researchers, I figured sharing my code and tutorial would be beneficial to many, so here I am writing this ✍️

In this tutorial, I’ll guide you step-by-step on how to set up an automated daily journal article brief in your Obsidian vault.

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Disclaimer: I’m no professional program developer or software engineer.

1) If you run into any problems while following my tutorial, I’m sorry I can’t help you (Please consult ChatGPT/Gemini).

2) If you find better ways to improve this code, good for you! Unfortunately, I will take no comment on improvements because my code does the job that I want, and that is good enough for me. 😊

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Prerequisite: Obsidian + Python

• You need both Obsidian and Python installed to set up the system. Especially with Obsidian (it’s a note app), if you are new, there are many Youtube videos that teach you how to install and do initial setup. Please do follow.
• For Python, I used Anaconda Prompt in my setup. I suppose you can use other Python consoles, but I can’t advise as I’m not an expert on this.

Step 1: Setting up Directory

Obsidian

In Obsidian, create a folder in your vault that will house all your future daily paper briefs, and save that directory path. For example, mine is

"C:\\Users\\NJK\\Documents\\PhD\\Daily Briefs"

File Directory

In the file directory, create a folder which will house the files that you need to run the code. For example, in my case, I created a folder named paper_brief_bot in:

"C:\\Users\\NJK\\Documents\\paper_brief_bot"

In this folder (paper_brief_bot), you will create 3 files.

1. config.json : this will have setting parameters
2. feeds.txt: this will have journals’ RSSs