Research notes

A research note is a piece of cited writing about an issue: what a proposal changes, what a hearing decided, what the record does and does not show. Every statement in a note is either cited to an exact excerpt of a source document or visibly marked unsupported. A note is reviewed by someone other than its author before it is shared, and its PDF export carries a record of how it was made.

Research notes are part of the Evidence & Content Studio. Open them from Research in the main navigation. How citations work is in Citations; how to find and save excerpts is in The document viewer.

Who can do what

Notes belong to the workspace. No other organization can see that a note exists.

Starting a note

Choose New note on the Research page, or start from where the evidence is:

• On a document, focus an excerpt and choose Start a new note. The excerpt is linked to the note, ready to cite.
• From an issue, a note started with the issue in hand is linked to it ("addresses"), and appears on the issue's timeline.

Give the note a title and say where it applies. With a location selected in the header, you can tick the jurisdictions the note is about (the county, the city, a district). Ticking none keeps it not tied to a place, and the note says so. Switching location later never changes a note's scope; edit it on purpose instead. The note is created in the project selected in the header, if any.

Writing

The editor offers paragraphs, two heading levels, lists, quotations, bold and italic. Two marks matter most:

• Citations. Tick excerpts in the Evidence tab, select the text they support, and choose Cite the selected text. Cited text is underlined and numbered: [1], [2], … in order of first citation, the numbering the export uses. See Citations.
• Unsupported. Select a statement nothing supports yet and choose Unsupported in the toolbar. It is highlighted with an "unsupported" tag here, in the review and in every export. Remove the mark once you cite it.

The line under the editor counts the sources cited and the statements marked unsupported.

Saving and revisions

Save revision writes the note as a new, numbered revision in your name. Revisions never change afterwards; the History tab lists them with who wrote each and how (written, edited, or an accepted AI paragraph). Saving an unchanged note writes nothing.

If someone else saved the note since you opened it, your save is refused rather than overwriting their work: choose Reload the note to see their revision (copy anything of yours first).

Draft with AI

The AI can draft paragraphs from excerpts you choose. It never writes into the note itself.

1. In Evidence, tick the excerpts the draft may use, in the order you want them considered.
2. Open Draft with AI, ask a question ("What do the amendments change, and when is the hearing?") and choose Draft with AI.
3. The answer arrives as a proposal: paragraphs whose sentences are each cited to the ticked excerpts or marked unsupported. Nothing in the note has changed.
4. Accept paragraph adds that paragraph to the end of the note as a new revision in your name, with its citations and unsupported marks. Reject records that you declined it. Each paragraph is decided on its own; the proposal shows who decided what and when.

Save your own edits before accepting a paragraph. Accepted paragraphs stay marked as AI-drafted in the export, even after you edit them, and the appendix lists every decision.

The draft may answer that the excerpts are insufficient to answer the question, saying what is missing. A draft that fails the platform's checks (a citation to an excerpt it was not given, a figure or date not in the excerpts, a link in the text) is withheld: you see why, and no proposal is kept. A Recorded response badge means the answer was replayed from a recording rather than produced live, as in development and tests.

Review

When the note is ready, open Review and choose Submit for review, optionally with a word to the reviewer. The current revision is submitted and the note is In review: it cannot change until it is reviewed or withdrawn. Editors and owners are notified.

An editor or owner who did not write the submission reviews it:

• Approve: the note becomes Reviewed. The approval belongs to that revision.
• Request changes: a comment is required. The note returns to draft and the author is notified with the comment.

The submitter, or an editor, can Withdraw from review. Any edit to a reviewed note makes it a draft again, to be reviewed again; the earlier approval stays in the record for the revision it was given to.

In a personal workspace there is no one else to ask, so you review your own notes. The review record says it was a self-review, and so does the export.

The Review record lists every submission and decision, and each change is in the audit log.

Exporting a PDF

Open Export and choose Export PDF. The export is of the saved revision; save first. Preview shows exactly the page the PDF is printed from. The PDF is prepared in the background; you are notified when it is ready, and Download appears in the list of exports. At most three exports of a note can be in progress at once.

The PDF holds:

• the note, with its [n] citations and unsupported statements visibly marked;
• Sources: each cited excerpt with its document, publisher, page, address, publication and fetch dates and terms label. Text is quoted only when the source's terms allow it (see Citations);
• Appendix: how this note was made: who wrote each revision, every AI paragraph accepted or rejected and by whom, the review record (or a statement that the revision is not reviewed), the unsupported statements, and the citation register.

Exports are kept with the note. An administrator's organization-wide export includes each note's completed PDFs under research-notes/.

Notifications

Turn any of them off in your notification preferences.

Links and search

The Links tab shows the note's links: the issues it addresses, the excerpts linked as evidence, and anything else linked to it. Notes appear in workspace search by title and text, and on the timelines of issues they are linked to.