Daily PubMed prep brief for tomorrow's external meetings
Each weekday at 6pm, get one email with a PubMed-grounded prep brief on every external attendee you're meeting tomorrow, citations and talking points included.
Every weekday at 6pm in my local timezone, build me a PubMed prep brief for tomorrow's external meetings and email it to me through Gmail before the workday starts the next morning.
Step 1: Pull tomorrow's events from my Google Calendar. Use the List Events action on the primary calendar with the time window set to tomorrow's start-of-day through end-of-day in my timezone, and expand recurring events into single instances. Drop any event that is cancelled, declined by me, all-day, or has no attendees besides me.
Step 2: Keep only meetings that have at least one external attendee. An external attendee is any attendee whose email address is not on my own email domain (the part after the @ in my own Google account). Treat resource and room calendars as not-external.
Step 3: For each external attendee, use PubMed (NCBI E-utilities) to look up their five most recent publications. Pull the attendee's name from the calendar invite (use displayName when present, otherwise the local-part of the email). Use the Search Database (ESearch) action against the pubmed database with retmax=5 and sort=date. Build the author query as Lastname FirstInitial[au]; for example Smith J[au]. If the calendar invite carries useful context like an institution, organization, or topic in the event description, AND it onto the query to disambiguate, for example Smith JA[au] AND (Stanford[ad] OR oncology[tiab]). Common names should be treated as low-confidence unless you can disambiguate.
Step 4: For the PMIDs ESearch returns, use the Fetch Full Records (EFetch) action to pull the abstracts in XML or MEDLINE format. Extract title, journal, year, abstract text, and PMID for each paper.
Step 5: For each external attendee, write a short profile with these sections: research focus in one or two sentences inferred from the titles and abstracts; two or three notable recent papers, each shown as title, journal, year, and one sentence on what was found; and one suggested talking point or question grounded in those papers. If no confident PubMed match was found, say so plainly under that attendee's name and skip the papers section.
Step 6: Concatenate every per-attendee profile into one HTML email organized by meeting time in chronological order. For each meeting show the time, title, and attendee list, then the profiles. Make every paper title a clickable link to its PubMed page (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/<PMID>/). At the top of the email give me a one-line summary like "3 external meetings tomorrow, 5 attendees researched". Flag low-confidence matches with a clear marker so I know to double-check.
Step 7: Send the email to me using Gmail's Send a Message action. Subject: "PubMed prep for tomorrow, [date]". From and To are my own Gmail address. If there are no external meetings tomorrow, send a one-line email saying so instead of skipping.
Notes on robustness: PubMed returns HTTP 200 even on bad queries, so check the response body for errors and treat empty results as low-confidence rather than a hard failure. Cap PubMed calls per attendee at one ESearch plus one EFetch. Keep going through the rest of the brief if any one attendee lookup fails, and note the failure inline.
Additional information
What does this prompt do?
- Reads tomorrow's events on your Google Calendar and keeps only the meetings that have external attendees.
- Looks up each external attendee in PubMed and pulls their five most recent publications, with abstracts.
- Writes a short profile per attendee: research focus, two or three notable recent papers, and a suggested talking point grounded in their work.
- Emails you one consolidated brief through Gmail, organized by meeting time, with PubMed links to every citation.
What do I need to use this?
- A Google account with Google Calendar and Gmail signed in.
- A free NCBI account so PubMed lookups run at the higher rate limit.
- Calendar invites that include external attendee email addresses (so the agent knows who to research).
How can I customize it?
- Shift the send time earlier or later, or change the cadence to daily including weekends.
- Tighten or widen what counts as an external attendee, for example by allowlisting partner domains.
- Adjust how many papers per person you want summarized, or ask for an extra angle like clinical trials or co-authorship overlap.
Frequently asked questions
Who is this for?
What if an attendee has a common name and PubMed returns the wrong person?
Does it cover meetings with multiple external attendees?
Will it skip internal meetings and 1-on-1s with my team?
Can I change the delivery channel to Slack or a Google Doc instead of email?
Related templates
Walk into every KOL meeting already grounded in their research.
Connect Google Calendar, Gmail, and PubMed once, and Geni emails you a citation-ready prep brief every weekday evening for tomorrow's external meetings.