ResearchHand

How to use it

Read it once. It is in the order you will meet these things, not the order the buttons sit in on the screen.

Starting from nothing

Say what interests you, however vaguely. Plan asks three questions: your field, what interests you, what you can actually reach. “Something about river pollution, a bicycle, ten weeks” is a real answer. Back come topics narrow enough to finish, each saying what data it would cost you.

Take the outline. Pick a topic and accept its outline. The chapters appear in your document, empty and in order, each carrying what it is for and the mistakes examiners flag in it.

Find out what work to go and do. Fieldwork turns your method into a checklist: what to measure, how many, with what, which photographs and what must be in frame. Every figure it implies becomes a placeholder in the right chapter, so the holes are in your document before you start.

Writing a chapter

Just type. Pause and the next sentence appears in grey. Tab keeps it, Escape drops it. In a chapter with no findings yet it refuses to invent them, and the list at the top of the page tells you what the chapter still needs.

Press the slash key for anything you cannot do. A chart from your data, a box to drop a photograph into, an equation, a citation, a heading, a list. You never learn the markup.

Select a sentence you are unhappy with. Five ways to have it back in better shape: grammar, clearer, plainer, more academic, shorter. Plainer is the one to reach for when English is not your first language. Nothing is replaced until you press Replace.

Write maths however you know it. “x^2 + sqrt(y) >= 3”, or LaTeX, or “a divided by b”. It typesets as you go, numbered if it stands on its own line, and exports as real Word and PDF maths rather than a picture of it.

Headings number themselves. Type “3.2 Study Area” and press Enter. The number is dropped from your text because numbering is computed at export, so nothing can print twice.

Sources, never invented

Search real databases. Search by topic or title, or paste a DOI. Every result comes from OpenAlex or Crossref, which means published work. The system cannot create a source, which is why your reference list survives being checked.

Press Use, not Cite. Saved papers are matched against what you have actually written, each showing the sentence it belongs to. Use drops the marker there, formatted in your college's style. If nothing matches yet, it says so rather than guessing.

Let it find the sentences that owe a source. Claims lists every sentence stating something as fact without a citation, and why it was flagged, so you can disagree. “Doesn't need one” is one click and it sticks.

Your data and figures

Bring the numbers in any shape. Paste columns, upload a spreadsheet, or type values in. Code draws the chart, and every value has to trace back to something you supplied. No model is ever allowed to supply a number.

Photographs go in a box sized to the page. Drop the image in. Its resolution is checked against the width it will really print at, so you are warned before export rather than after.

Already made the chart in Excel? Drop it in as an image. Nobody is forced through the data path.

Handing in

Formatting was never your job. Margins, heading levels, figure and table numbers, the citation style and the reference list all follow from your college's format, read once from their template or handbook. Changing style redraws every marker and the whole bibliography without touching a word you wrote.

Read what the document still needs. Hand in lists unfilled figures, sentences with no source, and paragraphs still in our words rather than yours. It never blocks you and it never silently passes you.

Take the file. Word and PDF from one pass, so the figure numbers in the copy you print cannot disagree with the one you email.

How much is yours

It is a record, not a guess. We know which words came from a model because we wrote it down as they were inserted. It is not an AI detector and we will never ship one: detectors are wrong most often about people writing in a second language, and nobody should carry that risk for writing in the English they have.

Watch it climb. Rewrite a passage in your own words and the number moves while you type. Whatever is still machine-written is listed, and opens where it sits.

What it will not do

It will not invent anything. Not a source, a DOI, a participant, a measurement or a result. Where something is missing you get a clearly marked placeholder and a question, which is the honest alternative.

It will not do your research. The measurements are yours to take. Structure, literature, citations, formatting and checking are ours.

It will not stop when your assistance runs out. Writing, formatting, existing citations, the bibliography and export all keep working at nought per cent. Only the expensive help pauses.

Worth memorising

Tab · Esc
keep the grey suggestion, or drop it
/
everything the editor can do
Enter
turn the line you just typed into a heading or an equation
Ctrl or ⌘ + B / I
bold, italic
Ctrl or ⌘ + Z
undo, including anything we inserted

Still stuck? Open any project and press the question mark in the top bar to be shown around again.

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