> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.consensus.app/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Monitor new research about a drug, device, or brand

> Track what gets published about a drug, device, or brand, and route only the papers that change something.

## What you get

A recurring brief covering what appeared in the literature about your products, your competitors' products, and the mechanisms behind them — filtered down to the items that matter, with an explicit empty state when nothing does.

## Who it's for

Commercial, medical affairs, and competitive-intelligence teams in life sciences, and consultancies running this on behalf of clients. Also the shape used by companies building literature monitoring into their own product.

## How it works

<Steps>
  <Step title="Build the watchlist from mechanisms, not just brand names">
    Brand names are unreliable in the literature — papers name the molecule, the device class, or the mechanism. Query all of them: brand, generic or molecule name, device category, and the underlying mechanism.
  </Step>

  <Step title="Add the competitor and author axes">
    Once you know which authors publish in the space, track their names as queries in their own right. Shifts in who publishes often precede shifts in what is published.
  </Step>

  <Step title="Window and diff">
    Set `year_min` and `month_min` to the last run. Diff on `doi` against stored state so the brief contains only what is new.
  </Step>

  <Step title="Interpret, do not list">
    For each new paper, say what it implies — a competitor's program stage, a safety question, a comparator result. Flag changes in venue, geography, or collaborator.
  </Step>

  <Step title="Escalate on signal type, not volume">
    Route safety findings and head-to-head comparisons to a human immediately. Everything else can wait for the weekly brief.
  </Step>
</Steps>

## The API call

```bash theme={null}
curl -G "https://api.consensus.app/v1/search" \
  -H "x-api-key: $CONSENSUS_API_KEY" \
  --data-urlencode "query=drug-eluting stent restenosis outcomes comparison" \
  --data-urlencode "year_min=2026" \
  --data-urlencode "month_min=8" \
  --data-urlencode "exclude_preprints=false" \
  --data-urlencode "page_size=100"
```

Useful narrowing for this workflow:

| Parameter                 | Why it helps here                                                                     |
| ------------------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| `medical_mode=true`       | Restricts to top medical journals and guidelines when general literature is too noisy |
| `country`                 | Region-specific briefs for local commercial teams                                     |
| `journal_name`            | Watch a specific venue where your category publishes                                  |
| `sjr_max=1`               | Top-quartile only, when volume is high and you need the papers that will be cited     |
| `exclude_preprints=false` | Keep preprints — early signals often surface there first                              |

## Turning it into a product

Several customers resell this. If that is the shape you are building:

* **The API is per-integration, not per-user.** One `x-api-key` covers your service; your own users never need Consensus accounts.
* **Size the plan against request volume.** A watchlist of 50 entities refreshed weekly, paginated, runs into the thousands of requests a month.
* **Cache on the full parameter set.** Two clients watching overlapping mechanisms will issue near-identical queries.
* **Pass the `url` through.** Every result links back to the paper on Consensus, which is the citation trail your users need.

## What to check before you trust it

* **Brand-name-only watchlists miss most of the literature.** Verify by searching the molecule and mechanism separately and comparing volume.
* **Alert when a run returns nothing across the whole watchlist.** That is usually a broken job, not a quiet week.
* **Short brand names collide.** Spot-check any entity producing unusually high volume for unrelated hits.
* **The brief must have an empty state and use it.** A monitor that always finds five things trains people to ignore it.

## Related

<CardGroup cols={2}>
  <Card title="Track new papers across many topics on a schedule" icon="calendar-days" href="/use-cases/scheduled-research-pipeline">
    The engineering underneath: pagination, diffing, backoff.
  </Card>

  <Card title="Build a drug target validation dossier" icon="dna" href="/use-cases/target-evidence-tiers">
    Go deep on a mechanism the monitor surfaced.
  </Card>

  <Card title="Best practices" icon="shapes" href="/use-cases/best-practices">
    Diff-against-last-run and the rest of the primitives.
  </Card>

  <Card title="All use cases" icon="grid-2" href="/use-cases">
    Browse the gallery by persona.
  </Card>
</CardGroup>