USER_GUIDE.md

End-user guide

Real scholarly search

1. Open the Literature discovery page.
2. Enter your actual research topic, choose Crossref, set a year range and click Search literature.
3. Each result is bibliographic metadata only. Click + Add to library to curate it.
4. In Evidence library, review the saved papers and remove irrelevant items.
5. In Evidence studio, choose a saved paper; paste short permitted excerpts or original research notes after consulting the paper yourself. Click Extract evidence to highlight matching sentences.
6. Use Research map to inspect year coverage, title terms, overlap and metadata completeness.
7. In Export & methods, download your session as JSON, plus CSV/BibTeX/RIS/Markdown as needed.
8. To resume, select your exported .json under RESTORE PREVIOUSLY EXPORTED SESSION and click the import button.

Testing with no API access

Select Load fictional demo on Literature discovery. It inserts six deliberately fictional publications. This confirms that controls work but the records are not suitable for academic citation.

DOI lookup

Paste a known DOI and click Lookup & save DOI. If the public service cannot respond, an error appears, and no fabricated metadata is inserted.

Citation quality note

Always verify title, authors, year, journal/book type, DOI and exact claim against the source. The tool is not a systematic-review screening service, plagiarism detector, fact checker, evidence quality grading system or autonomous literature-review writer.

Privacy

Do not paste passwords or confidential third-party content. The app stores your session only in browser memory and downloads. Live searches send queries to an external metadata provider, but your handwritten notes are not sent to a backend.