The document viewer

The document viewer is where research starts: read a source's text, save the passages that matter as excerpts, and put them to use in a research note or as evidence for an issue. It is part of the Evidence & Content Studio, and opens from a note's evidence ("Open in the document") or from a link to one excerpt, which scrolls to that excerpt and focuses it.

What it shows

• The header: the document's title, whether it is a public record or your organization's upload, its terms label, its publisher, and when it was published and fetched. A sentence under it says what the terms allow a note to do with the text, for example: "Link only: notes may cite it, and exports link to it instead of quoting it."
• The text, page by page, as extracted from the stored file. Saved excerpts are highlighted; select one to focus it.
• Excerpts: every excerpt of the document your workspace can read, in order. Choosing one focuses it.
• Provenance: where the document came from, its terms review, its fingerprint and versions (see Sources).

Saving an excerpt

Researchers, editors and project leads (and owners) can save excerpts. Select text in the document and choose Save excerpt. The platform checks the selection against the stored text, so an excerpt is always verbatim, and focuses the new excerpt. Excerpts you save are private to your organization, even on a public document. Readers can read excerpts but not save them.

Using an excerpt

With an excerpt focused, the Use this excerpt panel offers:

• Add to a note, ready to cite: pick one of the workspace's notes and choose Add to note. The excerpt is linked to the note as evidence and appears in the note's Evidence tab, ready to tick and cite. Notes in review are not offered, since they cannot change. Open the note takes you there.
• Start a new note: a new note that starts with this excerpt as its evidence.
• Link to an issue or another record: link the excerpt as evidence for an issue, or to any other record, without writing a note.

Adding an excerpt to a note does not cite it: citing is choosing which statement it supports, in the note (see Citations).

When the text does not load

A document whose text could not be extracted (a scanned PDF without a text layer, for now) has nothing to select. The provenance panel and Open in Sources still work, and you can download the original from Sources.