Too many papers, not enough time

A problem I know all too well, and the reason AnteSum exists.

Hello — I’m Ben, a senior resident anaesthetist in the NHS, about to complete my training and take up a consultant post.

AnteSum started as a personal fix. Anaesthesia has a number of journals worth following, and somewhere between nights, days and everything in between, I stopped keeping up. Email alerts from the journals went ignored. PDFs stacked up in folders I never opened. Every few months I’d discover a paper everyone else had apparently read months before.

So I built the thing I wanted to exist: one place that gathers every issue of the journals in my field, sorts the papers sensibly, and writes a short, readable digest of what’s new each month. Reading it takes about as long as a coffee break, which, on a good day, is about the time I actually have.

Talking to the orthopaedic surgeons, cardiologists and radiologists I work alongside, it transpired this wasn’t an only-me problem. AnteSum now covers more than one specialty, and the aim is simple: any clinician, in any field, should be able to stay current in minutes a week, for free.

The name is Latin: ante sum, “I am ahead”, chosen as the opposite of how following the literature usually feels. That is the whole aim: to tackle the problem of being always behind, to stay up to date with the research, for better care for our patients.

Two things I care about as it grows. First, honesty about how it’s made: the methodology page sets out exactly which journals are covered, what the AI reads, and how the digest is written. Second, that reading stays free for clinicians. Keeping up with your own field shouldn’t be a subscription.

If AnteSum saves you time, or you can see how it could serve your specialty, I’d genuinely like to hear from you: [email protected].

Ben