What if your study buddy never slept?
By week seven, the readings stack up, the lab report lurks, and your tabs multiply like gremlins. Last semester, I watched a classmate quietly crush deadlines. Their secret wasn’t more coffee—it was an n8n AI agent that harvested sources, summarized PDFs, and dropped clean notes into Notion before breakfast.
This guide shows you how to build a similar agent—no advanced coding required. You’ll stitch together a few reliable tools so the boring parts of research happen on autopilot.
Why n8n + AI, right now?
Automation chatter has spiked this week across maker and dev communities: students are wiring search → capture → summarize → organize into a single loop. n8n (n8n.io) is open-source and flexible, which means you can run it free on your laptop or a cheap server—and connect it to your favorite study stack.
Goal: Turn messy links, PDFs, and lecture notes into a tidy research brief and a to‑do list—automatically, every day.
Your lightweight toolkit
You can mix and match, but here’s a proven setup:
- n8n (self-hosted or Cloud) for workflows
- LLM provider (OpenAI, Anthropic, or OpenRouter) for summaries
- Storage/notes: Notion or Google Docs
- Source capture: RSS feeds, Perplexity API, or plain URLs
- PDF parsing: n8n HTTP + a PDF parser node or a small API (e.g., unstructured.io)
No budget? Swap in local models via Ollama and use Notion’s free plan.
The 30‑minute blueprint
1) Trigger on your schedule
Use n8n’s Cron node to run daily at 6:30 a.m. (before your first class). You can also add a manual trigger for mid-term sprints.
2) Fetch sources
Add a HTTP Request node (or RSS Read) to pull fresh links from your department, key journals, or saved searches. If you use Perplexity or a custom search API, pass a query like: “site:.edu renewable energy policy 2024 filetype:pdf”.
3) Clean and dedupe
Use Function or Set nodes to normalize titles and remove duplicates. Keep a small processed_links list in Notion or a Google Sheet so you don’t summarize the same paper twice.
4) Parse PDFs and pages
For each URL, download content with HTTP Request. If it’s a PDF, send it to a parser (unstructured, PDF Extract) and capture text + metadata (title, author, year). For HTML, strip boilerplate.
5) Summarize with goals in mind
Connect an LLM node. Feed it your cleaned text plus a short, reusable prompt:
Prompt snippet: “You are a research assistant for an undergraduate course called [Course Name]. Produce a concise brief (200–300 words) with key claims, methods, 3–5 bullet takeaways, and 2 quoted citations with page markers if present. Include a 1-sentence critique and 3 follow-up reading suggestions.”
For long papers, chunk the text and summarize per section, then ask the model to merge the chunks into a final brief.
6) Store and organize
Send results to Notion via the Notion node: database properties like Title, Source, Authors, Year, Summary, Key Takeaways, Course, Status. Or save to Google Drive and auto-generate a reading list kanban in Notion.
Optional: auto-citations and flashcards
- Use a Function node to format APA/MLA from metadata.
- Create Anki CSV lines from takeaways. Export weekly.
Guardrails that save grades
- Attribution: Always store the original link and a quote snippet in your notes.
- Hallucination checks: Add a second LLM pass: “Highlight any claim lacking a page number or explicit evidence.”
- Plagiarism safety: Never paste model output verbatim into submissions. Use it to guide your own writing.
Costs and limits
Running this daily on a handful of papers typically costs pennies with efficient models. Keep token use down with summaries capped at ~300 words and chunk sizes tuned to your model. Local models via Ollama cost time (CPU/GPU) instead of money.
A quick success story
Maya, a second-year econ student, set hers to scan two think tanks and a journal RSS. By Friday, she had a tidy Notion board: five briefs, links, and quotes—ready for her seminar write-up. The agent didn’t replace reading; it cut the search and sort part to near zero.
Try this next
- Add a Slack or email node to DM yourself the week’s top 3 papers.
- Trigger a Notion task when a paper matches keywords for your thesis.
- Use a voice note → transcript step (Whisper or similar) to merge lecture quotes into your briefs.
Ready to build yours?
If you want a starter workflow, we’re packaging a clean n8n template with comments and safe defaults. Subscribe to CampusClever and we’ll send it as soon as it drops.
Call to action: Join our newsletter for the n8n starter, model prompt recipes, and student-friendly tool picks. Want more automation ideas? StudentPlanify and PlanèteÉtudiant feature weekly builds from our network. Discover more tools and resources across our student sites.
