Help & support

TrendMD is a cross-publisher content recommendation widget for scholarly websites. We help publishers grow their readership, increase pageviews per reader, and generate revenue.

TrendMD benefits publishers in 3 ways:

1. Grow your readership:Once our widget is installed, we begin distributing links to scholarly content from your journals and blogs in the widget results of our relevant partner sites. We send a large amount of new unique visitors from many of the largest publishers to come discover, read, and cite your articles.
2. Increase pageviews per reader: TrendMD looks beyond just related links to help people discover, read, and cite interesting scholarly content from your journals and websites through personalized recommendations. Our recommendation algorithms continuously optimize the placements of links to your content for the right audience while readers are actively looking for something interesting to discover.
3. Generate revenue: Enhance the user experience while increasing revenue by showcasing personalized links to sponsored scholarly content from other publishers.

The recommendation widget, which is free for content providers (such as publishers) to install on their website(s), generates recommendations for readers based on their reading habits. Clicking on the link might take the reader to another article within the same publishers’ website(s)—or to a third-party website owned by a different publisher altogether. Each click on a link that directs a reader outside the host publishers’ website(s) earns the host publisher revenue, and/or a new visitor back to their site in return.

Here’s a concrete example, from the reader perspective:

1. JAMA publishes an article about respiratory disease and would like to promote it. They set a weekly budget, and the article is disseminated through TrendMD’s network.
2. Meanwhile, you’re reading a different article on respiratory disease in The BMJ. Since The BMJ has the TrendMD widget installed, it tells you that you might also be interested in the first article published by JAMA.
3. You click the link. Your click “costs” one dollar, which is deducted from JAMA’s credit balance. The BMJ and TrendMD split the proceeds—and JAMA enjoys the increased exposure and site traffic. Alternatively, The BMJ may opt to reinvest the proceeds earned from the click on the sponsored link in order to have their content distributed, thus receiving a visitor directed from JAMA or from another journal in the TrendMD network.

Both the appearance of the widget and the content presented by the widget can be fully customized using your dashboard. Here is an example of what the widget looks like on BMJ:

In most cases, the widget tends to perform best if placed directly below the abstract with 2 columns or on the right hand side of the page with 1 column. The number of widget columns can be set easily by logging into your dashboard - click here for more instructions.
That said, we encourage you yo A/B test to determine the optimal widget placement that yields the highest clickthrough rate.

TrendMD can be used on your website(s) for free, indefinitely. We promote links to your content on third-party sites in the TrendMD network so long as your credit balance is above zero. You determine how much TrendMD will cost based on how many new visitors you want us to direct to your website(s). You can add to your credit balance by setting a weekly budget or by using the auto-reinvest function which uses the revenue you earn from clicks on third-party sponsored links featured on your website(s), to promote your own content. ‘In-network’ recommendations are always free.
So if you want to ensure that your journal(s) get 1000 additional visitors per month, you set your weekly budget to $250 USD/week. See Additional visitors acquired for more details.

Traditional recommender systems stop at semantic enrichment (i.e. relatedness).

TrendMD utilizes a variety of factors to determine the best links for each reader, including relatedness, audience click behaviour (“people that read X, also clicked on Y”), article popularity, and personalization (i.e. what you have read in the past). Our algorithms are optimized to connect the right content to the right reader, at the right time.

Recommendation links dynamically pair with different articles and change locations across our network, based on where they are most likely to receive the highest click-through rate.

After you create a new account, you can login to your account here.

Yes. You can create unique logins for others at your organization by using the share button directly on the dashboard. You can grant access to all of the websites registered to your account, or restrict a user’s access to just 1 journal. See sharing features for more details.

Additional visitors acquired
Additional visitors that clicks on sponsored links brought to your website. Your credit balance decreases by 1 credit when a click occurs on a link to your content featured on a third-party site
Additional pageviews generated
Additional pageviews are generated when visitors click on recommended links to your content
Third-party affiliate link revenue
Revenue derived from visitors clicking on third party sponsored links shown across your website(s)

The ‘backlinks’ allow users to see which articles have recommendation widgets with links that point to their articles, and to show a record of exactly where the impressions and clicks occurred. The greater the number of backlinks, the wider the distribution is for any given article.



Clicking on the number of backlinks will lead to a window that displays a list of articles that contain links to your content. Both ‘in-network’ and affiliate content will have a list of backlinks.
Links to your article will change overtime; even though links to your article may have been seen in the widget results of another article at one point in time, it may have since moved based on clickstream data. See here for details on how we generate recommendations

Despite our name, TrendMD is a content recommender system currently used across all academic disciplines.

In-network links refers to any links that are seen within your websites (i.e. non-sponsored article links). ‘Affiliate links’ refers to any links to your content that are seen on third-party sites in the TrendMD network.

A click refers to when a user clicks on a link. An impression is when a user sees a link, but does not necessarily click on it.

Your clickthrough rate (CTR) acts as a ‘quality score,’ or in our case an ‘interest score’ to put the most interesting pieces of content in front of readers. The CTR is the number of times a click is made on a link divided by the total impressions (the number of times a link was seen):

Click-through rate = Click-throughs (#) / Impressions (#)

TrendMD uses CTR as a metric by which the algorithms recommend your content.

When asking how important it is, we need you to ask yourself, is CTR really an important metric to measure your campaign?

A High CTR means you are attracting a very wide audience to your content and often it is better to have a lower CTR and higher post-click engagement. This means you can reach a specific and relevant audience, as opposed to a broad audience

So keep this in mind when reviewing your performance inline with your campaign goals.

Login to your dashboard
Select the website where you want to find the journal ID for under 'All website' dropdown menu

Select 'Setup recommendations' under 'Setup' drop down menu

The journal ID is found in the Javascript code below

For larger publishers, please contact support@trendmd.com. We will provide you with all your journals ID’s.

In most cases, TrendMD will automatically index your articles via crawling or our API. But in the cases we don’t, you can also add articles manually via the following steps: Login to your dashboard Select the website to which you want to add the article to After clicking on the “More” button, click, “Add article”  Then input the relevant meta data into the fields provided The article will be added to the website you initially selected *Note: In the event we cannot fetch the meta data, you will be prompted to input the meta data manually. In this case, you will be prompted to fill out the meta data in the following window:

Content providers of all sorts, including authors and pharma promote their scholarly content through TrendMD. As buyers, they select a budget and pay only for the actual click-throughs they receive. Contact paul@trendmd.com to find out more about offering your authors TrendMD as a way to increase the visibility of their research and/or your pharma clients as a new way to distribute their purchased digital reprints online to targeted audiences.

No. We treat ourselves as a ‘guest’ on your website(s). The TrendMD widget always loads after the page, and has been designed to never interfere with the functioning of your website(s).

Due to demand, from time-to-time, there can be a delay in generating recommendations for new articles. In general, the delay should be no longer than 30 minutes. If, however, you do notice that >24hr has past, and still no recommendations are generated for new articles, please contact support@trendmd.com

Whether you’re simply a content lover who consumes our content or an TrendMD client, your data is safe with us. We do not share it with any 3rd parties. See TrendMD Privacy Policy for more details.

For general technical support please contact support@trendmd.com
For detailed questions about your account please contact paul@trendmd.com

If you want to set up link tracking simply contact us at support@trendmd.com and ask us to append a tracking parameter to your account. This parameter will customize all your article URLs, enabling you to identify and track the URLs which attract the most users to your content.

Go to your google analytics 'Home' dashboard page and choose the journal you want to look into. Go to your dashboard viewing options on the left, scroll down then click on 'Behaviour' --> 'Site content' --> 'All pages'.



In the search box on the right hand side of the table, search using 'trendmd'.

Search trendmd-shared=0 for tracking TrendMD traffic within your sites.

Search trendmd-shared=1 for tracking TrendMD traffic referred to your sites from third-party sites.

To make it easier to visualize all the of the tracked content, go to the bottom of the stats table and change the number of rows.