A lot of research now starts in a chat window. You describe your topic, an AI assistant suggests angles, you push back, it lists some papers, you refine the argument. By the end you have something genuinely useful — and trapped in a conversation you can't cite from.
The catch is that AI assistants are confident liars about sources. They'll produce a perfectly formatted citation for a paper that doesn't exist. So the conversation is a great starting point and a terrible bibliography.
Folio's Import from AI chat is built around exactly that tension.
What it does
Open New ▾ → Import from AI chat, paste the thread, and click Analyze chat. Folio pulls out four things:
- a working thesis or research question,
- an outline of sections,
- the sources the conversation referenced, and
- the key claims you established.
Then it opens a new document already populated with your thesis and outline, with the claims captured as notes to address.
The part that matters: verification
Before Folio trusts any source it found, it checks each one against CrossRef — by DOI if the chat gave one, otherwise by matching the title. Sources it can confirm are marked Verified and selected by default. Sources it can't are marked Unverified and left unchecked.
That means the hallucinated citations — the ones your AI assistant invented — show up clearly labeled and don't get added unless you knowingly override it. You leave with a library you can actually defend.
Get a better import with the prompt
Pasting a raw transcript works, but you'll get more out of it if you ask the assistant to summarize the conversation cleanly first.
In the import window, click Copy prompt. It copies a short, structured prompt: paste it into your ChatGPT or Claude chat, and the assistant replies with a labeled brief — topic, thesis, outline, sources with DOIs, and key claims. Paste that reply into Folio instead of the whole thread.
Two reasons it's better:
- More verified citations. The prompt asks for DOIs and explicitly tells the assistant not to invent sources, so CrossRef confirms more of them.
- A tighter outline. You get the structure the conversation implied, not a wall of back-and-forth.
From draft to done
Once you're in the editor, the rest of Folio takes over: inline citation suggestions as you write, the citation checker, proofreading, and a pre-export check. The conversation that used to evaporate when you closed the tab is now the spine of a real, cited paper.
Folio is free to start with the Scholar plan. Try it.