TrendMD’s content recommendation engine, an innovative content marketing solution, delivered 450,000 article readers last month

Faced with the challenge of finding research they need across a staggering and ever-growing number of articles online, researchers and clinicians are clicking on personalized article recommendations delivered by TrendMD’s recommendation widget.

TrendMD is a graduate of the UTEST program’s third cohort.

Using sophisticated algorithms across millions of articles served each month, recommended articles are identified based on keywords and user behaviour, such as click behaviour (“people that read X, also clicked on Y”), article popularity, and personalization (what the specific visitor has read on past visits to the network). From an article page with the TrendMD widget, readers get direct links to recommended articles either from within that publisher, or from a third-party publisher — exactly at the moment they are engaged in research– saving time and increasing awareness of relevant research they may not have discovered with a keyword search.

“Since launch, each week we have consistently increased viewers reached by at least 5%. We’re now generating over 95 million recommended articles to approximately 12 million readers per month. Of the people we reach, we’ve delivered over 450,000 readers to publishers in the network. As we continue to grow the TrendMD network, we retain readers longer and increase new traffic for our publishers. We’ve invested in infrastructure to prepare for significant growth in partnerships. We recently indexed over 1 million articles from Wolters Kluwer and began delivering readers to more articles right from the point our recommendation software went live,” said Paul Kudlow, co-founder of TrendMD.

Ingentaconnect recently added 96 journals from 32 publishers to the TrendMD network. Byron Russell, head of Ingentaconnect at Publishing Technology explains, “Each month we direct thousands of readers to our publishing clients’ content and add value by enhancing their research experience. Partnering with TrendMD is an innovative way of delivering more value to both readers and publishers. Readers get highly targeted recommendations for further research, and our publishers’ articles get significantly greater visibility through TrendMD’s growing network.”

In the past month, TrendMD’s recommendation widget was added to over a million articles across hundreds of journals from leading STM publishers such as Wolters Kluwer, Elsevier, Nature Publishing Group, and others. TrendMD’s network is a growing list of the world’s leading research publishers which includes BMJ Group, IEEE (EMBS), MDPI, and Rockefeller University Press. The article recommendation widget is featured across more than 70 publishing partners and is viewed by nearly 12 million readers per month.

“Science, medicine, nursing, and allied health are strengths of our publishers’ network. We can deliver specific article recommendations personalized to a cardiologist’s interests, for example. Articles are identified based on what the user is reading at the moment and what he or she and others also clicked on from within the TrendMD widget across visits to network publishers’ articles,” Paul Kudlow commented.

Since its launch in 2014, TrendMD’s content discoverability engine has become increasingly sophisticated. More content is added, user data expands, and algorithms are enhanced and tested. To determine TrendMD’s effect on weekly page views, this summer a controlled test was run for a group of 1000 randomly selected articles published in BMJ Open. Articles included on the TrendMD recommendation widget increased weekly page views by 10% and as high as 16% and 28% under different controlled conditions during the six week test period, demonstrating the TrendMD widget’s effectiveness as a content marketing solution.

Researchers and authors today place a high value on speed and discoverability for their research and now publishers have a new way to intelligently distribute articles online — based on user behaviour — saving research time and accelerating the impact of research on practice.