Chapter 30 · The Project
The Research Library
Every project has a research library, and it holds two different things: the material you brought, and the cited answers Storskarvia went and found. Both live on one page, because both are the facts behind the draft, and a second navigation item called Research would be a coin toss every time.
Two halves of one page
Open a project from the Studio and click the Research card, described as "Cited answers, filed where you're writing." The page is headed with your project's title and splits into three stacked areas:
| Area | What is in it |
|---|---|
| The ask box at the top | A text field and a Research button: where you put a question to the researcher. |
| On the shelf | The material you brought: PDFs, images and links. The deed, the map, the photograph of the house, the article you are going to argue with. |
| Answers Storskarvia found | Every research note this project has ever kept, newest first, each with its sources. |
The shelf is yours to fill. The notes below it are written by the researcher and nothing else, which is the same bright line the rest of the application holds: Chapter 1 covers it.
Asking a question
There are two doors into the same library.
From the editor. Open the Review tab in the ribbon and click Research. A dialog opens with a question field and a Library → button in its corner. If you had text selected, the first 400 characters of it appear at the top of the dialog in quotation marks and are sent as context, so the answer is aimed at the passage you are stuck on. Press Enter or click Research.
From the library page. The field at the top takes the question on its own, with no passage attached. Use it when the question is about the world rather than a sentence.
Either way the note is filed against the project. Ask from chapter nineteen and the answer is waiting in the same library when you are working on chapter two.
Two things make a question do nothing at all. A question under four characters is ignored silently. Asking from the library page in a project with no documents yet raises an alert reading "Add a document to this project first.", because the researcher runs against a document. Make a document, then ask.
Reading the answer
While it works you get a spinner and the words Searching sources…. The researcher uses the same retrieval the fact-checker uses and answers strictly from what came back. A finished note carries four things:
- Your question, as you typed it.
- The passage, if you highlighted one, shown in quotation marks and trimmed to 160 characters in the list.
- The answer, a short paragraph or a few tight sentences. No preamble.
- The sources, up to six, each opening in a new tab. If nothing usable is cited, the top retrieved sources are attached anyway, so an answer always shows its receipts.
A freshly returned answer also carries a confidence badge: high, medium, or low. It is calibrated by corroboration rather than by tone. High means the key facts were confirmed by two or more independent sources in the evidence. Medium means the answer rests on a single source. Low means the sources conflicted, coverage was thin, or the answer needed inference to get there.
The badge is not stored. It is reported on the answer as it arrives, and it is gone from that note when you reload the page. The question, passage, answer and sources are all kept.
One thing is stored, and it is worth knowing about. Every year and figure in an answer is checked back against the retrieved evidence. Anything that appears in the answer but not in the sources is called out in the note itself, in square brackets, saying the figure could not be confirmed and to treat it with care, and confidence drops to low. An ungrounded number is how an invented detail reaches a writer dressed as research.
The shelf
Under On the shelf, ⬆ Add a file uploads as soon as you pick a file, and Save link handles the URL field beside it. The optional What is it? field sets the title on either; leave it empty and an upload takes its filename, a link its address.
Files are identified by their actual bytes rather than their extension, and the limits are firm:
| Rule | What you see when you hit it |
|---|---|
| PDF, PNG, JPG, GIF or WebP only | "PDF, PNG, JPG, GIF or WebP only." |
| 25 MB per file | "That file is over 25 MB." |
| 40 megapixels per image | "That image is too many pixels to display (N megapixels). Scale it down first." |
| 300 items per project | "A project's shelf holds 300 items. Remove something first." |
| 500 MB per project | "This project's shelf is full. Remove something first." |
| Links must be http or https | "Attach a file, or give a http(s) link." |
The megapixel rule catches people who never hit the size rule. A large, flat scan can be a few hundred kilobytes on disk and about a gigabyte once decoded, which kills the tab that tries to display it.
A link is kept as a link. Storskarvia does not fetch the page, snapshot it, or keep a copy. If the page goes away, your shelf keeps the address and the title and nothing else. When a source matters, save it as a PDF yourself and upload that.
Uploaded files are served through the same permission check as the rest of your project and are kept out of any public path, so the address of a scanned deed is not a way to read it. Removing an item asks you to confirm, then deletes the record and the file together. There is no undo.
Keeping it beside the draft
In the editor, open the View tab and tick Reference. A pane opens beside your page with a picker listing the other documents in this project and, under a Research shelf heading, everything on the shelf. Images and PDFs display in the pane. A link opens in a new tab instead of being framed, because most sites refuse framing and the ones that agree would then be running inside Storskarvia's own page.
If a file was removed since the page loaded, the pane says "That file is no longer on the shelf." rather than going blank.
Coming back months later
The library keeps everything until you remove it, which is the point of it. Notes are listed newest first and the page shows all of them, with no filter box and no folders, so on a long project use your browser's own find on the page to reach a question you half remember. Give shelf items titles you would recognise in a year: "What is it?" is the only handle you get later.
Delete on a note asks "Delete this note?" and then removes it permanently. Notes and shelf items are separate; removing one never touches the other.
The research library is where facts get filed. The Story Bible in Chapter 26 is where they get enforced: an entry there is what the continuity editor and the fact-checker read when they check your draft against itself, and Part VI covers that staff. For a worked example on a period piece, the guide How to research historical fiction walks the whole loop.
What it costs, and what can go wrong
A research question costs one AI action from your monthly allowance, whatever its length. A fact-check is counted proportionally against the length of the document instead. Allowances are 20 actions a month on Free, 1,000 on Pro and 5,000 on Studio; Part IX covers how the count resets and what happens when you run out.
Two failures you may meet:
- Out of allowance. The answer area names the number of actions you have used and the plan you are on. No note is filed.
- The research failed. You get "Research failed. You weren't charged. Try again." The allowance is refunded before that message reaches you.
One more surprises people. In a document somebody shared with you, the Research button is not in the Review tab at all: the AI staff runs on the owner's allowance, so a collaborator cannot spend it. Part VII covers what each shared role can do.
Updated 2026-09-06 · Full contents · Something wrong or missing?