Setting Up Your Perfect Research Feed

You downloaded ZiNote, created an account, and now you are staring at an empty Discover screen wondering what to do next. Good news: getting a steady stream of relevant papers takes about two minutes of setup and roughly a week of casual swiping. After that, the app practically reads your mind.

This guide walks you through picking the right keywords, understanding how the system finds papers for you, and making the most of the recommendation engine so your feed becomes more accurate every single day.

Step 1: Open the Keyword Manager

On the Discover screen, look for the + button in the top-right corner. Tap it to open the Keyword Manager — this is where everything starts.

Keywords are the single input you give ZiNote. You do not need to pick journals, select databases, or configure anything else. Just tell the app what you are interested in, and it handles the rest.

Free plan: up to 3 keywords
Pro plan: up to 20 keywords

Even with just three keywords, you can build a surprisingly effective feed. The trick is choosing them wisely.

Step 2: Choose Your Keywords Strategically

Not all keywords are created equal. A little thought upfront saves you from drowning in irrelevant papers later. Here is a simple framework that works well for most researchers.

Core Keywords (2-3)

These represent your main research direction — the topics you work on every day. They should be specific enough to return papers you would actually cite.

Good examples:

"graph neural networks for drug discovery"
"single-cell RNA sequencing clustering"
"reinforcement learning for robotics manipulation"
"transformer architectures for time series forecasting"

Notice how each keyword is a focused phrase, not a single word. The more precise you are, the better your initial results will be.

Exploration Keywords (1-2)

These cover adjacent fields you are curious about — areas that might inspire new ideas or methods you could borrow.

Good examples:

"federated learning privacy" (if your main work is in distributed systems)
"protein folding prediction" (if you work in computational biology but want to track structural biology trends)
"causal inference in observational studies" (if you are a machine learning researcher interested in causality)

Exploration keywords keep your feed fresh and help you spot cross-disciplinary connections you might otherwise miss.

What to Avoid

Overly broad terms will flood your feed with noise:

"AI" — too vague, covers everything from chatbots to self-driving cars
"deep learning" — thousands of papers published every week; you will never keep up
"machine learning" — same problem
"biology" — far too broad to be useful
"NLP" — still too wide unless combined with a specific sub-topic

A helpful rule of thumb: if a term could be an entire department at a university, it is too broad. Narrow it down to the level of a research group or a specific problem.

Quick-Start Keyword Recipes

Here are a few ready-made keyword sets to give you inspiration:

| Research Area | Core Keywords | Exploration Keyword | |---|---|---| | NLP researcher | "large language model alignment", "retrieval-augmented generation" | "human-computer interaction for AI" | | Computational biologist | "spatial transcriptomics analysis", "gene regulatory network inference" | "foundation models for biology" | | Robotics PhD student | "sim-to-real transfer learning", "vision-language models for robot planning" | "embodied AI benchmarks" |

Feel free to experiment. You can always add, edit, or remove keywords later.

Step 3: Understand How the System Finds Papers

Once you save your keywords, ZiNote immediately gets to work. Here is what happens behind the scenes — without getting into any technical details.

The app searches everywhere for you. When you enter a keyword, ZiNote automatically queries arXiv, PubMed, Semantic Scholar, and every other major academic source. You do not need to pick which databases to search. You do not need to visit multiple websites. The system covers all of them in one sweep.

Think of it like a research librarian who checks every shelf in every library on your behalf and brings back only the papers worth reading.

New papers appear continuously. ZiNote does not just search once. It keeps monitoring your keywords and pulls in fresh results as new papers are published. Your Discover feed is always up to date.

All you do is swipe. The entire experience boils down to this: papers show up, you swipe right to save the ones you like, and you swipe left to skip the rest. That is it. No filters to configure, no search syntax to learn, no databases to navigate.

Step 4: Watch Your Recommendations Get Smarter

Here is the part that makes ZiNote different from a simple search tool. Every swipe teaches the system a little more about what you actually want to read.

Day 1: The Starting Point

Your initial feed is based entirely on your keywords. The papers will be relevant to your topics, but the system does not yet know your specific preferences. You might see some papers that are technically on-topic but not quite your style — maybe too theoretical, too applied, or from a sub-area you do not care about.

What to do: Just swipe honestly. Save what genuinely interests you. Skip what does not. Do not overthink it.

Day 3: Preferences Take Shape

After a few days of swiping, the system has enough data to start noticing patterns. Maybe you consistently save papers with certain methodologies, or you always skip review articles, or you prefer papers from specific sub-communities within your field.

What you will notice: The ratio of interesting papers to skippable ones starts improving. Your feed begins to feel a bit more "you."

Day 7: The Feed Clicks

By the end of the first week, the recommendation engine has a solid understanding of your taste. Papers that show up in your Discover feed are noticeably more aligned with what you actually want to read. You will find yourself skipping fewer papers and saving more.

What you will notice: Swiping sessions feel faster and more productive. You are spending less time filtering and more time reading things that matter.

Beyond Week One

The system never stops learning. As your research interests evolve — maybe you start a new project or pivot to a different question — your swipe behavior naturally shifts, and the recommendations follow. You do not need to manually reconfigure anything. Just keep swiping, and the feed adapts.

Step 5: Let AI Suggest New Keywords

Eventually, you might swipe through all the papers matching your current keywords. When that happens, ZiNote does not leave you with an empty screen.

The app automatically suggests new keywords based on what it has learned about your interests. These suggestions combine your existing topics with patterns from your swipe history to propose keywords you might not have thought of yourself.

This is especially useful for:

Discovering adjacent fields you did not know were relevant
Refining broad interests into more specific, productive keywords
Keeping your feed alive without requiring you to brainstorm new search terms

You are always in control — the app suggests, but you decide which keywords to add. If a suggestion does not look right, just ignore it and wait for the next one.

Tips for Getting the Most Out of Your Feed

Be honest with your swipes. The system learns from every interaction. If you save papers you do not actually plan to read, you are teaching it the wrong preferences.
Revisit your keywords monthly. Research directions shift. Swap out stale keywords for new ones that reflect your current work.
Use all your keyword slots. If you are on the free plan, use all three. If you are on Pro, you do not need to fill all twenty immediately, but having 8-12 active keywords gives the system much more to work with.
Give it a full week. The biggest improvements happen in the first seven days. If you try ZiNote for one afternoon and give up, you are leaving the best part on the table.

Start Building Your Feed Now

Open ZiNote, tap the + button on the Discover screen, and add your first keywords. Within a few days, you will have a research feed that feels like it was built just for you — because it was.

Download ZiNote and set up your research feed today.