Archive / Research & notes
A 1945 essay proposed linking personal records by association
Vannevar Bush's essay describes an imagined memex and associative trails, not a machine that was ever built.
3 min readResearch & notes
Keep the source attached
A useful answer needs a question, a source and a way for the next reader to check both. Start with evidence gathering; move to extraction and a portable citation library.
Your working sequence
- Turn a research question into an evidence table that survives disagreement
A reproducible way for a solo operator or small team to collect evidence, compare conflicting sources, and hand the work to another reader without losing provenance.
- Check PDF extraction before you trust the summary
A quick, repeatable quality check for deciding whether PDF text, tables, and OCR output are reliable enough to feed into notes or summaries.
- Hand off a citation library without handing over a puzzle
A practical Zotero handoff method that preserves attachments and meaning while making the collection understandable to a teammate.
Go back to the underlying research
Read the original chapter with its caveats. Or use the work tools to make the next decision explicit.
From the archive
All topic recordsArchive / Research & notes
A 1962 report framed computers as tools to augment thinking
Engelbart's SRI report defines augmenting human intellect well before any product built on it existed.
3 min readArchive / Research & notes
Elicit measured how often its own summaries invent claims
The vendor's own hallucination study puts a number on a risk most literature-review tools only gesture at.
3 min readArchive / Research & notes
A yes-or-no meter for scientific claims comes with no error rate
Consensus links every claim to a peer-reviewed paper but does not publish a measured hallucination rate for its own meter.
3 min readArchive / Research & notes
A citation checker labels a claim as supported with no audit trail
Scite classifies citations as supporting or contrasting but its own pages do not document how, or by whom, that call is made.
3 min readArchive / Research & notes
Semantic Scholar shipped a summary feature it could not prove worked
The nonprofit's own blog says its A/B tests found no conclusive evidence its one-sentence summaries helped users at all.
3 min read