Focal Interest publishes automated summaries of publicly available research metadata and abstracts. These pages are not peer reviewed and should be treated as reference-style records, not original research or medical, legal, or financial advice.
How summaries are created
Each post is generated automatically from bibliographic metadata and abstracts provided by research indexing services (principally OpenAlex) and from publicly available identifiers (such as DOI records). Supplementary metadata — including author affiliations and funding information — is retrieved from CrossRef where available. The system does not read full papers unless a public link is available.
Source selection and quality filtering
Not all works retrieved from OpenAlex are published. The pipeline filters by publication type (journal articles and reviews), requires a minimum abstract length, and checks for verified journal identifiers (ISSN). Works from repositories or sources without a confirmed journal record undergo an additional abstract-level review using an AI model to verify that the work reports original empirical research or substantive synthesis. Works that do not meet this standard are discarded before summarisation. For the full list of specific exclusion criteria, see the Quality Standards page.
Concept and topic assignment
Each post is associated with a set of research concepts derived from OpenAlex topic and keyword data. These concepts are filtered before publication to remove low-relevance assignments and suppress parenthetical disambiguation terms that do not reflect genuine topical content. The resulting concepts link to a structured vocabulary at /concepts/, where each concept page lists all articles associated with that topic. Concepts reflect OpenAlex classification and are not independently assigned or verified by Focal Interest.
Retraction monitoring
After publication, works are periodically rechecked against retraction data from CrossRef and the Retraction Watch database. This process runs on a weekly automated schedule. Posts associated with retracted works are updated or annotated accordingly.
What is included
- The research title, author list, and available institutional affiliations
- The journal or venue and publication date (when available)
- A DOI link and an OpenAlex record link (when available)
- Funding information from CrossRef (where available), including funder names
- Links to public landing pages or PDFs (when available)
- An AI-generated summary based on the abstract and metadata
- Research concepts drawn from OpenAlex and filtered for relevance
- Image credit and license information (when an image is used)
Scope and Limitations
- Peer review, editorial endorsement, or fact-checking beyond the source metadata
- New experimental results or original reporting
- Full-text interpretation when only an abstract is available
- Claims that the summary represents the authors’ intent beyond what the abstract states
About images
Images on Focal Interest are illustrative. They are selected to match the general topic of a post and are not figures from the underlying research paper unless explicitly stated. Image credits and license information are provided when an image is used.
Corrections
If you believe a summary misrepresents the underlying metadata or abstract, please contact us with the relevant link and a description of the issue. When appropriate, we will update the post to better reflect the public record.