Last updated August 4, 2026
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The Reduction is an email digest of newly published orthopaedic literature. Each issue is short by design: a handful of new papers from the subspecialties you select, every one with a summary so you can decide in a few seconds whether it is worth opening. It is meant to be read in the few minutes before your first case, not saved for later.
It is written for practicing orthopaedic surgeons, fellows, residents, medical students and for other allied clinicians — physician assistants, nurse practitioners, physical and occupational therapists, and nurses. You tell us your role at signup, and it shapes the balance of the issue: a resident's digest leans further toward general orthopaedics, while an attending's leans toward their declared subspecialty.
A standard issue contains three recent original articles, one review, and one classic. The recent articles are the new literature in your fields. The review is a narrative review that gives the broader picture on a topic. The classic is a landmark older paper — at least five years old and selected on citation weight — resurfaced on the theory that the foundational work is worth revisiting. You can change any of these counts on your preferences page.
No. The Reduction is free.
It is an independent project of a practicing orthopaedic surgeon. This is not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by any journal, publisher, professional society, or institution.
Both. “Orthopaedic” keeps the ae of the original Greek — Nicolas Andry coined orthopédie in 1741 from orthos (straight) and paidion (child), the specialty having begun with straightening children’s deformities — and it is the spelling the AAOS and most of the field’s journals use, so it is what you will see throughout this site. “Orthopedic” is the common American simplification. The digest is the same digest under either spelling, and either one will find us.
Each subspecialty has a defined set of journals it draws from — core orthopaedic journals and subspecialty specific journals. Within that set we take what has been published recently, giving weight to higher levels of evidence such as randomized trials. Anything you have already been sent is excluded permanently, so you will never receive the same paper twice.
The one-line summaries are generated by an AI model from the article's published abstract. They are there to help you triage quickly, and they are not a substitute for reading the paper. The title, journal, authors, and link are taken directly from PubMed and are never rewritten.
A classic is a paper at least five years old that has been highly cited, selected from a pool built for your subspecialty. The intent is to put one genuinely foundational paper in front of you on a regular basis, whether it is one you have never read or one you last read in training.
Fifty-six journals across ten subspecialties: hand and upper extremity, adult reconstruction, shoulder and elbow, orthopaedic trauma, spine, orthopaedic oncology, foot and ankle, pediatric orthopaedics, sports medicine, and general orthopaedics. Each subspecialty draws on its own dedicated titles together with the four general journals. The full list is visible, and individually selectable, on your preferences page.
Yes, and suggestions are genuinely welcome. Reply to any issue with the title you would like to see included.
As often as you choose. You can receive it every day, on weekdays only, or on specific days of the week. It is prepared overnight, so whichever days you pick, it is waiting when you start the morning.
At any time. Every issue carries a link to your preferences page, where you can add or remove subspecialties, adjust how many articles you receive, change your delivery days, and update your institution. Changes take effect from the next issue.
It lets you name topics, authors, or journals you particularly want to see — scaphoid, rotator cuff, a specific investigator, a specific journal. Matching articles are moved up your issue, and once a week a match will lead it outright. Interests are ordinary text, so they can be as broad or as narrow as you like, and you can switch one off temporarily without deleting it.
If you subscribe to general orthopaedics alongside a subspecialty, a slider controls how the issue is divided between them. It starts from your stated role — residents and students default to a more general mix, attendings to a more specialised one — and you can move it whenever you like.
Yes. The preferences page has a vacation hold that stops all email until you switch it off. Nothing accumulates while you are paused, and you will not be sent a backlog when you return.
Yes. The number of recent articles, reviews, and classics is individually adjustable, including setting any of them to zero if you would rather not receive that section at all.
If you tell us your institution at signup, links route through LibKey, which takes you to your library's full-text copy in one click wherever your institution holds a subscription. If you do not give an institution, or your library does not hold that title, the link goes to the article's PubMed record instead.
Leave the field blank and every link will point to PubMed, which is always accessible.
For many of them, yes. The Reduction tells you what has been published and summarizes it; it does not provide access to paywalled full text and cannot grant rights we do not hold. The institution setting exists specifically to make the most of whatever access you already have, and PubMed abstracts remain freely available for everything.
The overwhelming majority of these cases are hospital and university mail filters holding the message in spam, low priority, or quarantine folders — often without notifying you. Start by searching your junk, low priority, or quarantine folder for “The Reduction”. If you find nothing at all, the message may have been rejected before reaching your mailbox, in which case the most reliable fix is to resubscribe with a personal address. You are welcome to write to us and we will tell you what our sending records show for your address.
We recommend a personal address — Gmail, iCloud, Outlook, or similar. Hospital and university mail systems apply aggressive filtering to outside newsletters, and the common failure is silent: the message is quarantined, you are never told, and it simply appears that nothing was ever sent. A personal address is one you control. You lose nothing by using one, because your library's full-text links come from the institution field in your preferences, not from the domain of your email address.
Yes, and replies are monitored. Feel free to reply with any questions, comments, suggestions, or issues.
No. There is no tracking, so we do not know whether you opened an issue or what you clicked. The links in your digest go directly to PubMed or your library rather than through us. The only delivery information we hold is whether the message was accepted or bounced, which is what allows us to stop sending to dead addresses.
Never. Your address is not sold, rented, shared, or used for anything other than sending you the digest and the occasional message about your own subscription. The subscriber list is not published and is held in access-controlled storage with an encrypted off-site backup.
Every issue carries a one-click unsubscribe link, which stops all email immediately. If you want your record removed entirely rather than merely deactivated, reply to any issue and ask; the record is deleted and the residual delivery history is purged.
Yes. Every article ever sent is available in a public, searchable archive at getthereduction.com/archive. No account or subscription is needed to use it.
You can filter by subspecialty, by journal, by article type (recent, review, or classic), and by whether a paper is a randomized trial, and you can search the full text of every title, summary, and abstract at once.
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