Discovery Agents are always-on scouts. You tell one what to watch, and it scans the literature on a schedule, ranks what it finds against your field and your library, writes a one-line reason each finding matters, and keeps it all in one place. They live under Radar → Discovery agents — and their findings are now also a Discovery panel inside the editor, so you can add a result to your library, or add it and drop a citation, without leaving your document.
Every Folio account on a paid plan gets an automatic "Hot in your field" agent, seeded from your research field. Chair plans can run several agents at once, each tracking a different topic.
Create an agent
Open Radar → Discovery agents and choose New agent. Tell it what to track — a specific topic works far better than a broad one ("retrieval-augmented generation for clinical notes" beats "AI in medicine"). Then pick a persona. Personas aren't just for looks: each one carries a hunting style that pre-fills the agent's settings — how far back it looks, how many citations it requires, how often it runs, and whether it searches the live web. You can override any of it.
What each finding shows
For every result, the agent gives you:
- Why it matters — a one-sentence note on the specific contribution, written for your field.
- The abstract — shown in full, not clipped.
- Related to your library — a badge when a finding connects to something you've already saved.
- One-click actions — add it straight to your library (it stays marked "in library"), or dismiss it.
You can sort findings by relevance, newest, most cited, or recently found, and filter to just the new ones, open-access ones, or ones related to your library.
The agent console
Each agent has a console with three tabs:
- Briefing. A short narrative of the themes across recent findings, refreshed on the schedule you choose — daily for fast-moving topics, weekly otherwise. Turn on email to have it sent to you, and on Chair you can attach narrated audio to listen on the go. Past narrations are saved so you can replay or share them.
- Ask. Chat with the agent about its findings — "summarize the themes," "which of these challenge my thesis?" Conversations are saved, so you can pick up where you left off without re-running anything.
- Trends. A timeline of findings by publication year and the recurring topics across them, with a small "rising" flag for topics concentrated in the last two years.
Deep scan (Chair)
By default an agent searches scholarly databases. Turn on Deep scan and it also searches the live web with an AI agent — surfacing preprints, lab pages, and reputable write-ups that the databases miss. Deep findings are tagged so you know where they came from.
Across your agents
If you run more than one agent, the agents page shows an aggregate view of trends across all of them, plus Synthesize across agents — one summary of the common threads connecting your different topics.
Follow an agent anywhere
Turn on the RSS feed in an agent's settings to get a private link you can drop into any reader, so an agent's findings show up alongside everything else you follow.
Settings
Open any agent's settings from the gear on its card, or the Settings button on its page. You can rename it, change what it tracks, adjust recency and citation thresholds, switch personas, set the run schedule and the findings-email cadence, manage the RSS feed, and delete it. Email cadence and the master email switch also live in Settings → Notifications.