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Portfolio Management Research (PMR) publishes 13 highly respected journals serving the global investment community. They have been hosted on the HighWire platform since 2020, providing PMR with a cutting-edge feature set, integrations with internal finance systems, and powerful discovery tools.
PMR works closely with HighWire to support the ever-changing needs of their users, and highlighted emerging opportunities to improve user engagement through personalisation. The existing homepage already had several features to help promote key content. However with diverse topics and growing volumes of articles – now over ten thousand – it became even more important to help users discover content which is relevant to their specific interests, and which surfaces trends in the wider community.
In collaboration with PMR, HighWire designed three additional features:
- Recommended for You – personalized articles based on users’ behavior
- What’s Popular – the most viewed content across all relevant journals
- Latest Issues – a quick view of the most recently published issues
These updates created an experience where the user can immediately see content which is tailored to their areas of interest, or which is popular with their peers, all on a one-stop-shop homepage. It reduces the time it takes to search, so they can spend more time engaging with the core research content.
The algorithms used to identify relevant content for each user were refined over several iterations of testing, taking into account variables such as if a user had visited an earlier version of an article, and what they had previously engaged with.
These updates are part of a wider programme of work in which HighWire is adding new personalisation functionality in several areas. Please get in touch if you’d like to find out more
For a better user experience, PMR wanted to enhance user engagement, content discovery, and personalization. They wanted to customize the homepage that could highlight trending articles, show the latest issues, and make personalized recommendations based readers’ choice.
HighWire Hosting team was to collaborate with PMR team to create a personalized homepage that:
- displayed what’s new and trending across journals
- made it easier for users to find the content of their interest
- delivered a personalized experience to the user without major changes to the UI
Together with PMR, we introduced three new content sections to the homepage:
- Recommended for You – personalized articles based on user behavior
- What’s Popular – the most viewed content across all journals
- Latest Issues – a quick view of the most recently published issues
These sections make the homepage feel fresh, timely, and tailored to each reader.
What’s Popular
A live-updating carousel shows the 10 most-read articles across all 13 journals. We built an API to pull real-time engagement data—views, clicks, etc.—and highlight content that’s resonating with readers right now.
Each article card includes:
- Title
- Author(s)
- Journal name
- Volume and issue details
It’s a quick way for users to see what others are reading and share their own views.
Latest Issues
This section features the 5 most recently published journal issues. Each entry includes a cover image and direct links to the issue, encouraging readers to explore the newest content across the PMR portfolio.
Recommended for You
This is the part where we’ve added personalization. We track the last 10 topics (or subject areas) a user interacts with and calculate a score based on how often and how deeply they engage with each one. Then we:
- Turn those scores into weighted content slots
- Select 9 new articles from those topics (not previously read)
- Prioritize recent publications
If someone’s brand new or hasn’t engaged yet, we show one fresh article from each journal. If there’s truly no data to work with, we simply hide the section.
We also built in smart filters—for example, if a user already read the pre-press version of an article, we won’t show them the published version again.
HighWire built the back-end logic, APIs, and personalization engine, working closely with PMR’s team to fine-tune the design and functionality. We focused on:
- Data aggregation across all journals
- Clean, user-friendly front-end design
- Logic that adapts to each user’s reading behavior
We tested everything thoroughly and rolled out the changes with minimal disruption.
It’s too early to comment on the effectiveness of the updates; however, we are expecting an improvement in the session duration, number of pages per session, and overall user engagement.
This is the second personalization we’ve done in the past few months. If you’d like to customize your journal’s home page, write to us, or reach out to your HighWire account manager. We’d be happy to add new features to your website!