About Foreground
A way to keep up with, and search, the medical and surgical literature. It runs daily surveillance across 30 specialties, organizes what it finds by relevance to each field, and stays open to read with no account required. Built by a hospitalist.
>30,000 articles indexed across >3,000 unique journals, refreshed daily.
How it works
An open catalogue
No account, no setup, no API key. Search across 30 fields spanning the internal-medicine rotations and the surgical specialties, adjust the relevance bar, and filter by study design. The library keeps itself current through automatic surveillance, and the landmark-trials collection for every field is one click away.
How ranking works
Each article is ranked by relevance to each field, based on the query that surfaced it, its evidence type (a guideline or RCT ranks above a commentary), and topic similarity. It is tagged by study type, with the paper's own conclusion shown. The tool organizes the literature; it does not interpret it for you.
Run it as a club
Name a club, set a password, and share both with your residency program, division, or study group. Everyone signs in to the same club, with shared fields, shared saved and read marks, sticky notes, and custom PubMed surveillance queries. Pulling fresh literature is free.
How comprehensive it is
Two streams feed the library, both through the National Library of Medicine's index: the flagship journals read cover to cover (NEJM, JAMA, The Lancet, BMJ, the Annals, and the major surgical journals), and per-specialty surveillance queries refined through actual clinical use. Beyond the curated feed, the search box reaches all of PubMed with full query syntax.
What it doesn't do
No medical-literature tool covers everything. These are the limits worth keeping in mind.
- Relevance is not a quality grade. The score reflects how central an article is to a field, not whether the study is sound. A high score can still sit on a weak trial, so the appraisal is yours.
- The feed favors recent clinical literature. Daily surveillance covers these 30 specialties and their journals, so basic science, niche topics, non-English work, and very new articles are less complete in the feed. The search box covers all of PubMed when you need the rest.
- Summaries come straight from the abstract. The card shows the paper's stated conclusion when the abstract provides one. Nothing is rewritten or invented, but nothing is interpreted either.
- Citation data takes time to build. Counts and impact metrics develop over months, so the newest articles often have little or none.
- It does not replace reading the paper or clinical judgment. It helps you find and organize the literature. The interpretation is up to you.
What it costs
It's free. Read the full library with no account, search all of PubMed, see landmark trials for every field, and start a club with a shared feed, saves, notes, and custom queries. Daily surveillance keeps it current. The optional AI summaries run on your own Anthropic API key, stored only in your browser.
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