Using Scholar AI to interrogate your sources

What Scholar AI is

Scholar AI is a question-answering tool that searches your own source library — not the open web. Ask it a question and it finds relevant passages across your sources, synthesises an answer, and cites everything so you can verify. It knows what you've read, not what the internet says.

How to use it

1. Open the Scholar AI panel in the editor.
2. Ask any question about your sources.
3. Scholar AI searches your library, finds relevant passages, and synthesises an answer.
4. Citations are included in every response — click any citation to jump directly to the source.

Scholar AI in the collaborator chat

Scholar AI also shows up in a second place: the chat on a shared document (Chair plan). There it acts as an advisor on the shared draft — it reviews your writing and sources and tells you what's strong, weak, or missing, but it never writes the paper for you. That's different from the sidebar here, which answers your private questions about your library. Same assistant, two jobs. See Sharing and collaborating.

Good questions to ask

Scholar AI works best with specific, source-grounded questions. Some examples:

• "What do my sources say about the relationship between sleep deprivation and academic performance?"
• "Is there a tension between [Source A] and [Source B] on the role of social media in political engagement?"
• "Find evidence for the claim that active recall improves long-term retention"
• "Summarise the methodology used in [paper title]"
• "Which of my sources discuss sample size limitations?"

Limitations

• Scholar AI only searches sources in your library. If the answer isn't in your sources, it won't be in the response. Add more sources for better coverage.
• It works best with text-based PDFs and well-structured articles. Scanned PDFs with no selectable text may not be searchable.
• Scholar AI is a research assistant, not a replacement for reading. It can point you to the right passage, but you should verify important claims yourself before citing them.

Plan limits

Scholar AI is available on every plan, with different limits. The free Scholar plan includes a monthly taste — 10 questions a month. Fellow raises that to 20 questions per hour, and Chair to 60 per hour. See Plans and billing for the full picture.