A citation is a route to evidence, not a substitute for reading it.
Give each stage a different job
Research software is easier to assess when discovery, extraction and storage are separate. Discovery proposes material worth opening. Extraction turns passages into a structured working record. A reference manager keeps the source identity attached to your notes and writing. Asking one answer box to do all three can hide where a mistake entered the process.
Two distinct kinds of product evidence
Elicit describes scientific-research workflows including paper search, literature review and data extraction. Those features describe the product's intended work; vendor examples and accuracy claims are not a guarantee for your question, document type or field. Inspect Elicit's current product scope.
Zotero's documentation describes a reference library with bibliographic metadata, collections, tags, attachments, notes and citation integrations. It gives a source record somewhere durable to live alongside your own observations. Read Zotero's overview.
Make a claim ledger, not another pile of summaries
For each important statement in a draft, record the source title, author or publisher, date, exact supporting location and the words you plan to publish. Add a field for whether the source actually supports that wording. A paper discussing an association does not automatically support a causal headline. A demonstration on one task does not establish that the same effect holds across a profession.
Our suggested trial uses a question you know well enough to recognize obvious omissions. Keep a small set of relevant documents you found independently, then compare what the tool retrieves. Investigate missing material as carefully as apparent successes. This is an informal diagnostic, not a statistically valid recall benchmark.
Inspect extractions where the answer can be checked
Choose a table or passage with a known answer. Ask for the relevant population, comparison, outcome and limitation. Open the original to verify every field. If the source does not contain an answer, an honest blank is more useful than a plausible completion. Preserve uncertainty in the working table instead of smoothing it into confident prose.
Leave an auditable handoff
A colleague should be able to follow your conclusion without recreating the entire conversation. Keep the query, inclusion rules, source list and unresolved disagreements together. Reference software can organize that trail, but the judgment about study quality and applicability remains yours. This guide is an editorial workflow proposal, not a replacement for a formal systematic-review protocol or specialist review.
Source receipts
Primary pages checked for the stated product facts or evidence. The proposed pilots and buying questions are Atlas analysis, not reported study results.
Elicit · Checked 2026-09-16
Zotero / Digital Scholar · Checked 2026-09-16