Chapter 40 · The Staff
Asking the Researcher a Question
The Researcher answers one question at a time, from sources it goes and finds, and shows you those sources. It is the quickest member of the staff to use and the easiest to use badly, because the words you type decide what it looks for. This chapter is about asking well and reading what comes back with the right amount of suspicion.
What the Researcher is for
Three parts of Storskarvia deal in facts, and each has a different job.
| Tool | Starts from | Use it when |
|---|---|---|
| Check Facts | Your draft | The pages are written and you want every checkable claim in them tested. Chapter 35. |
| Research | Your question | You are stuck on one thing you do not know yet: what a ration book looked like, how long the crossing took, whether the word existed. |
| The research library | Your project | You want to find an answer again, or keep your own PDFs and links. Chapter 30. |
The Researcher answers. It never drafts a sentence for your manuscript, and nothing it returns goes into the page unless you type it there yourself.
Opening the dialog
- In the editor, open the Review tab in the ribbon.
- If your question is about a particular passage, select it first.
- Click Research. A dialog titled Research opens with a field reading What do you want to know?
- Type the question and press Enter, or click the Research button under the field.
With text selected, the first 400 characters of the selection appear at the top of the dialog in quotation marks. Line breaks are folded into spaces. That quoted passage travels with the question. With nothing selected, the question goes alone.
Each time you open the dialog it starts empty: the previous question and answer are cleared from it. They are not lost: Where the answer goes explains.
Asking well
The question is the search. Storskarvia looks in English-language Wikipedia and on the open web using the words of your question, the same retrieval the fact-checker uses, and then writes an answer strictly from what came back. The passage you highlight shapes how the answer is aimed at your scene. It has very little say in which sources are found. So the nouns belong in the question.
| Weak | Stronger |
|---|---|
| Would she have had one of these? | Did households in rural Ireland have a telephone in 1951? |
| Is this right? | How long did the Liverpool to New York crossing take on a Cunard liner in 1912? |
| What would he wear? | What did a London bus conductor's uniform look like in the 1960s? |
| Tell me about the siege and the food and who was in charge | Three separate questions, asked one at a time. |
Four habits cover most of it:
- Name the place and the year. "Then" and "there" mean nothing to a search.
- Use the term a reference work would use. "Telegram" finds more than "that paper message thing".
- Ask one thing. A compound question gets a thin answer to each half.
- Highlight the passage when the answer depends on it. "Is this plausible?" with the scene selected gets an answer about the scene; the same words with nothing selected get a guess at what "this" means.
Questions under four characters are ignored without a message. There is no follow-up conversation either: every question is answered fresh, with no memory of the one before it, so "and what about in winter?" has nothing to refer to. Write the whole question again.
What it cannot see
The Researcher receives your question and your highlighted passage. That is all. It does not read:
- the rest of the document, or any other document in the project;
- the Story Bible;
- the files and links on your research shelf;
- your earlier research notes;
- any period or setting you have told the fact-checker about.
If your novel is set in 1943 and you ask "was nylon available?", the Researcher has no idea which year you mean. Say 1943. If the answer depends on a character's age or job, say that too. The PDF of a deed on your shelf will not be consulted, however relevant it is; read it yourself, or ask a question the web can answer.
Reading the answer
While it works, the dialog shows a spinner and Searching sources…, and the Research button is disabled. A finished answer has three parts.
A confidence badge above the answer, reading high, medium or low confidence. It measures corroboration and nothing else:
| Badge | Means |
|---|---|
| high confidence | The key facts were confirmed by two or more independent sources in what was retrieved. |
| medium confidence | The answer rests on a single source. |
| low confidence | The sources disagreed, coverage was thin, or the answer needed inference to get there. |
The answer, a short paragraph or a few sentences with no preamble. When the evidence does not settle the question, the Researcher is instructed to say what is known and what is not, rather than guess. Take that at face value: a hedge from the Researcher means the sources hedged.
The sources, up to six links, each opening in a new tab. Open the one that matters before you rely on the answer. The answer is a summary, and the source is what you would cite.
Watch for one addition in square brackets at the end of an answer. Every year and figure in the answer is compared with the retrieved sources, and any that do not appear in them are named in a note saying they could not be confirmed and should be treated with care. Confidence then drops to low. The comparison is with the sources, not with your question, so a year you typed yourself can be flagged when the answer repeats it and no source mentions it. The note does not say the figure is wrong. It says nothing retrieved supports it.
If an answer arrives with no source links under it, the search found nothing to cite. Treat the answer as unsupported, and ask again with different nouns.
Where the answer goes
A successful answer ends with Saved to your research library. It already is: the question, the passage you highlighted, the answer and its sources are filed against the project, so a question asked from chapter nineteen is waiting when you are working on chapter two. The Library → button in the corner of the dialog opens that page.
The confidence badge is the one thing not kept. Reload the library and the badge is gone from that note, while the sources remain. If the rating matters, note it before you close the dialog. Chapter 30 covers finding and deleting notes.
When nothing comes back
| What you see | What it means |
|---|---|
| Nothing happens when you press Research | The question is under four characters. Write a real question. |
| A message asking you to verify your email first | Your account's email address is not confirmed yet. Use the link Storskarvia emailed you, or resend it from your studio. |
| "You've used all N AI actions on the plan plan this month." | Each question costs one AI action, however long it is, and this month's allowance is spent. No note is filed. |
| "Research failed. You weren't charged. Try again." | The search or the answer step broke. The action is refunded before the message appears. Asking again is safe. |
| No Research button in the Review tab | You are in a document someone shared with you. The staff runs on the owner's allowance, so collaborators do not get it. Part VII covers shared roles. |
For a worked example of the whole loop on a period piece, from first question to checked draft, see the guide How to research historical fiction. Part IX explains how the monthly allowance is counted and when it resets.
Updated 2026-09-16 · Full contents · Something wrong or missing?