What Research & start does
Research & start (called Cold Start until recently) takes a topic description and returns a research brief. It searches the academic literature (Semantic Scholar and CrossRef) and your own library, finds relevant sources, proposes thesis angles, and outlines a structure you can start writing from. It's not a first draft, and it never becomes one: the brief is planning material, the work you'd normally do in the first few hours of a new project, compressed into a minute.
How to use it
- Choose Research & start on the dashboard or in the sidebar's New document menu. (In a new, empty document, the Research & start option on the start card does the same and attaches the brief to that document instead of creating a new one.)
- Describe your topic. Optionally add your field, paper type, academic level, citation style and word count, and upload your assignment instructions or syllabus so the brief follows them. The more detail you give, the more useful the output.
- Choose Find sources & generate and review the brief. Under Choose your argument, pick the thesis angle that fits your paper best.
- Review the suggested sources. They all start selected; untick any you don't want (All and None help).
- Give the document a title and choose Start writing.
What happens when you choose Start writing
- The document starts empty. Folio doesn't write your first paragraph, and it doesn't put the outline's headings into the page. The first words are yours.
- The brief opens beside the document, in the editor's Research brief panel: the angle you chose, the other angles, the suggested outline (with a rough word count per section), the guiding principles and the sources you kept. Every item has a Copy button, so you can pull a heading or a phrase across when you want it, and rewrite it in your own words.
- The sources you kept go into your library, tagged
cold-start, ready to cite.
To reopen the brief later, choose the compass icon in the editor's side bar, or Research brief in the command palette. The brief is kept on the device you made it on, with that document. Remove brief at the bottom of the panel deletes it; your document and your library stay as they are.
What the brief includes
- Thesis angles: three or four specific, arguable positions grounded in the literature, to choose from
- Suggested outline: a section-by-section structure for your paper
- Suggested sources: ten or more papers worth reading, with sources already in your library marked In library
- Guiding principles: a handful of pointers for writing this particular paper
Tips
- Be specific about your topic. "Social media and politics" produces a vague brief. "The effect of algorithmic content curation on political polarization among 18-24 year olds in the US" produces a useful one.
- The brief is a starting point, not a prescription. Argue with the angle, reshape the outline, ignore sources that aren't relevant. It's your paper.
- You can run Research & start more than once with different details to explore different angles on the same topic.
Plan limits
Research & start is available on every plan. Scholar (free): 3 a month. Fellow: 1 a day. Chair: 2 a day. The free Scholar plan also includes 10 Scholar AI questions and 3 proofreads a month.