Auto-Write Research Reports

What it is

Auto-Write turns a Research Cafe into whatever document you actually need — not just a prose report. As of W1.32C, pick from 19 document types in five categories (Core, Present & compare, Analyse, Learn, Communicate) — a one-page brief, a slide deck, a comparison table, a study guide, a press release, and more — and optionally a style and tone to write it in, all inside labelled boxes that stay shut unless you open them. Leave everything alone and click Write: you get exactly today's report, in exactly today's voice — nothing about the default path changed. Auto-Write composes strictly from sources you've already gathered — it never researches a fresh topic itself. Curate sources into your Serving Tray, use everything already in your Cafe's Sources tab, write from your Ask-Your-Café in-scope sources (Café mode), or hand-pick exactly which sources and prior runs to include with the granular selector — then Auto-Write synthesises a document grounded in what you chose. Each document is saved as a first-class artefact inside the Cafe — open it back up any time, read it in the central reading pane, rename it in place, change the citation style, copy, download as Markdown, as a single book-grade PDF (W54), or — for a slide deck or table — as a native .pptx/.csv file (W1.32C), share with another signed-in user, rewrite it as a different kind of document without re-running research (W1.32C), or feed it back into the Tray as input for a follow-up write.

Want Auto-Write to research a brand-new topic from scratch? That's Professional research's job, not Auto-Write's (as of W1.18 Step 2) — run Professional research on your topic first, then come back to Auto-Write to compose a report from what it gathered (or tick Full Report inside Professional research itself to write the report in the same run — see Full Report).

Auto-Write reports live in the Cafe's Reports tab (as of W1.42, its own tab beside Chats and Sources — before that, a group inside the sources rail from W1.13) — click a row to read it in the reading pane. Each report is also URL-addressable at /cafe/[cafeId]/artefact/[artefactId] for bookmarking.

Scope — what it covers and what it doesn't

• In scope: composing from already-gathered sources only — no new searches; four input modes (From Sources / Café / Tray + Sources / From Tray); 19 document types in 5 categories, plus Style and Tone (W1.32C, replaces the old "Scribe Type" control — see Document types below); granular per-source selection with pin/exclude; folding whole prior runs (Professional research, Find the Truth, an earlier Auto-Write report) in as input ("run-picking"); 8 citation styles; in-report convert-to-style; copy, download (.md), download as a whole-report book-grade PDF (W54), and — for a slide deck or table/spreadsheet — download the native file (.pptx / .csv, W1.32C); manual bibliography editing; BibTeX / RIS / PDF / Markdown export (per-source); re-using a report as a Tray item; rewriting a finished report as a different document type without re-running research (W1.32C — see Rewrite as…); per-report sharing via a share link; reading pane rendering; in-place title renaming (W1.32C); citation display gated by the (now-internal) scribe-type label; highlight-to-tray from report text; delete reports.
• Out of scope: Truly-public sharing (recipients must be signed-in Coffeescribe users). Researching a brand-new free-text topic — that's Professional research's job (as of W1.18 Step 2, Auto-Write's Topic tab was removed; the two engines share the same report-writing pipeline via Professional research's optional Full Report toggle, and, as of W1.32C, its own "Report output" pre-choice — see Research Mode). .xlsx export — only .csv is available for tables and spreadsheets.

Getting started — four modes

Open a Research Cafe, click ✦ Pro on the chat composer, and choose Auto-Write under the Write heading (as of W1.44 — previously reached via a Deep research ▾ menu in the view bar, and before that a ✨-icon button in the retired workspace toolbar). Its setup fills the centre column, with tabs for each input mode. As of W1.18 Step 2, there is no free-text Topic tab — a note under the tabs points you to Professional research if you're starting from a bare topic instead of gathered sources.

From Sources mode

1. Open Auto-Write and switch to the From Sources tab.
2. The setup shows all sources currently in your Cafe's Sources tab and a token-cost estimate.
3. Submit. Auto-Write synthesises a report directly from all the sources in your Cafe — no Tray curation needed. Source-linked items are cited; the agent selects the most relevant passages.

Use From Sources when you have gathered research in your Cafe but haven't curated a Tray yet and want a report immediately. Combining this with the Sources tab's "Credible only" filter is a fast way to get a report from only your trustworthy sources.

Café mode (W1.18 Step 2)

1. In the Sources tab, make sure the sources you want included have their Ask-Your-Café scope checkbox ticked (see Ask-Your-Cafe Scope) — Café mode writes from exactly that in-scope set.
2. Open Auto-Write and switch to the Café tab (shows a live count of your in-scope sources; disabled when nothing is in scope).
3. Submit. Auto-Write synthesises a report from only your Ask-Your-Café-scoped sources — every in-scope source is cited.

Use Café mode when you've already curated what should ground your Q&A chat (the checkboxes) and want the report to draw from that exact same scope, without having to re-curate a separate Tray.

Tray + Sources mode

1. Curate the sources you most want featured into your Serving Tray.
2. Open Auto-Write and switch to the Tray + Sources tab.
3. The setup synthesises from both your Tray items (highest priority — weighted by the agent) and the rest of your Sources tab (secondary fill). A count and cost estimate are shown before you start.

Use Tray + Sources when you have a curated shortlist of important sources in the Tray but also want the report to draw on the broader research in the Cafe. The Tray items are featured prominently; the Sources tab fills in context.

From Tray mode

1. Curate the sources you want included into your Serving Tray first. Both source-linked items (snippets with a citation) and plain notes (observations you wrote yourself) are included.
2. Open Auto-Write and switch to the From Tray tab.
3. The setup shows the source count, note count, and a token-cost estimate based strictly on the Tray's contents. Source-linked items are cited with [N] markers; plain notes are woven into the prose as observations without citation markers.
4. Submit. No new research is done — Auto-Write synthesises only the Tray items you chose. This is the right mode when you've already vetted your sources or you need to constrain the report to a specific set.

Which mode should I use?

Researching a fresh topic from scratch? None of the four modes do that — open Professional research instead, let it gather sources on your topic, then come back to any of the four modes above (or tick Professional research's own Full Report toggle to skip the round-trip).

Choosing exactly which sources go in (W1.18 Step 2)

Every mode above shows a "Choose sources" disclosure under the tabs (small, collapsed by default — click to expand). Left untouched, a report uses everything that mode's rules would include anyway — nothing changes if you never open it. Expand it to hand-pick:

• Check/uncheck individual sources and tray items — narrow the pool to exactly what you want.
• Pin (📌) a source to force it into the report even if the auto-selection algorithm would otherwise skip it (e.g. a large source-count run that trims to the strongest subset).
• Exclude a source to keep it out even if it would otherwise be included.
• Fold in whole prior runs ("run-picking") — tick a previous Professional research run, a Find the Truth run, or an earlier Auto-Write report and every source that run/report used is added to the candidate pool, mixable with your loose source and Tray selections. The composed report is saved as its own new run — it doesn't alter the runs you pulled from.

The pre-flight cost estimate always reflects your final selection, including anything pulled in via run-picking. When a run gathers more sources than fit comfortably in one report, a deterministic auto-selection algorithm (quality score + source-type diversity + freshness) picks the strongest subset for you — pinning and excluding let you override specific calls it makes.

Document types (W1.32C)

Auto-Write supports 19 document types, organised into a gallery of five categories. Pick a card in the setup before generating — Report is pre-selected, so clicking Write without touching the gallery produces exactly the report Auto-Write has always produced. Every type description below reads as an at-a-glance card in the gallery too; hover or tap a card for the same one-line description.

Every type uses the same citation pipeline — [N] markers and a References section are present regardless of which one you pick, and the citation style is still set at the Cafe level (or overridden per-export). A few types that structure their content in table or heading form (Comparison table, Spreadsheet, Slide deck) unlock a matching native download — see Downloading a document as its native file format below.

Documents get a real name now (W1.32C). Before this update, an Auto-Write document could be filed under a fallback like "Objectives" or "Answer" — the first line of the body. Now the planner (for multi-pass, 9+ source writes) or the writer itself names the whole document before a word is generated, and formats with a mandated opening line (like Executive memo's Subject line) have that name harvested automatically. You can always override it yourself — see Renaming a report below.

The five boxes (W1.51)

Auto-Write's setup has the same calm shape as Professional research. The first screen shows only what it is writing from (the four source tabs and "Choose sources"), the document-type gallery, the cost line and Generate Report. Everything else is folded into five shut boxes, each showing what it is currently set to on its own summary line:

Every row inside a box carries a small ? — focus or hover it for a plain-English explanation of what that lever does. (Before W1.51 these controls lived behind a single Advanced drawer; nothing was removed, only grouped and labelled.)

Style and Tone

In the Style & tone box, two axes that compose into any document type:

Leave both alone and nothing changes — a default style/tone is never injected into the prompt, so an untouched write reads exactly as it always has. Pick a non-default style or tone and the writing visibly shifts — each preset is written as a concrete constraint the model checks its draft against, not a vague adjective, so "Academic" reliably reads differently from "Casual."

Citations, length, model and signals — everything else

The last two boxes hold the controls that used to be scattered elsewhere: Citation style, Structure (answer-first vs. narrative) and Length cap (a hard word cap) in Citations & length; Model (override the Cafe's default model for this write) plus two checkboxes in Model & signals:

• Confidence signalling — the model flags where evidence was thin, mixed, or single-source rather than stating everything as settled fact.
• What we couldn't determine — appends an explicit section listing open questions and gaps the sources did not resolve.

"Scribe Type" is gone as a separate control (W1.32C). Its old values — Academic Paper, Research Brief, Summary, Explainer, Literature Review — now live inside the type gallery and the Style presets above (e.g. the old "Academic Paper" is now White paper + Academic style). Reports and documents generated before this update still render exactly as they did — nothing about an existing artefact changed, only the control you use to make a new one.

Choosing the document type before a run (W1.32C)

You don't have to wait for a run to finish and then open Auto-Write separately. A Professional research run setup — and a Quick run fired from the chat's Deep research chip — hands back whatever document type you picked: the Document type box holds the same 19-type gallery, and the Report options box holds the same Style, Tone, Citation style and Length cap, so you can choose "FAQ" or "Study guide" before you click Start.

• Left alone, nothing changes. The section defaults to Report with no style or tone — the exact document every run has always produced.
• The same controls whichever door you came through, including a Quick run — picking a document type isn't a power-user setting, and a fast answer as an FAQ or a study guide is just as likely to be what someone wants as a plain report.
• The Report options box's other controls disappear if you tick "Research only" — there is nothing to pre-choose for a run that isn't writing a document.

See Research Mode → Starting a Run for where this section sits inside a run's setup screen.

Rewrite as… generating a new document from the same sources (W1.32C)

Already have a finished report and wish it were a slide deck instead? Every finished Auto-Write report and Professional research full report has a "Rewrite as…" action in its action row (and in the Reading pane's toolbar) — click it and Auto-Write opens pre-filled with that report's own sources already selected.

• No research runs again. The new document is composed strictly from the sources the original report used — same as any other Auto-Write write, just pre-populated instead of starting from a blank selector.
• It's a genuinely new artefact, billed as a new write (the same token cost any Auto-Write generation would carry for that source count). The original report is untouched and stays exactly where it was.
• Pick any document type in the gallery — the point of Rewrite as… is usually to change the type (comparison table → slide deck, brief → literature review), but nothing stops you from rewriting into the same type with a different style or tone instead.
• You can still adjust the pre-filled source selection before generating, or clear the form entirely to start a fresh write from scratch.

Renaming a report (W1.32C)

Click a report's title in the full-screen reader (or the reading pane) to rename it in place — type the new name and press Enter, or click elsewhere to save. Escape cancels without changing anything. This works because every document now gets a real generated name (see Document types above) rather than a fallback — renaming just lets you override it when the generated name isn't the one you'd have picked. Owner-only; a shared/read-only viewer sees a plain, non-editable title.

Reports live in the Cafe's Reports tab

After a report is generated, the Auto-Write setup closes and a row appears in the Cafe's Reports tab (as of W1.42 — its own tab beside Chats and Sources; from W1.13 to W1.42 it was a group inside the sources rail). The row shows the report title, date, citation style badge, and model used.

Reading a report in the pane

Click a report row and it opens in the central reading pane (reports no longer expand inline in a card). The pane shows:

• The full report body with inline citation markers
• The formatted bibliography (cited sources only)
• A Research used block listing every source that fed into the report — present on every report, including Summary and Explainer types where bibliography citations are hidden by default

Highlight to Tray from a report

While a report is open in the pane, you can drag-select any text in the report body — the Ask-AI popover appears with an Add to tray action. Selected text is added to the Serving Tray as a note (not linked to a source citation — it's synthesised text). This is useful for pulling a particularly well-written passage forward into a follow-up report.

Opening the full-screen view

Click Open full (in the action row below the report body — as of W1.44) to open the full URL-addressable report page at /cafe/[cafeId]/artefact/[artefactId]. From there you can edit the bibliography, share the report, or export it.

Citation display by scribe type

This is legacy machinery, kept only so older reports keep rendering exactly as they did (as of W1.32C, Scribe Type is no longer something you pick — see Citations, length, model and signals above). Each older report carries a stored scribe type from when it was generated, and its citation display default still depends on it:

A report generated on the new type gallery defaults to citations shown, regardless of which of the 19 types or style you pick. A Show / Hide citations toggle appears on every report — old or new — so you can override the default at any time. When citations are hidden, inline [N] markers and the bibliography section are both concealed — the prose reads cleanly. Toggle them back on to verify sources. The toggle is available in both the inline-expanded card view and the full-screen report page.

Author-date citation rendering

Reports generated with APA 7, Harvard, Chicago Author-Date, or MLA 9 citation styles render proper author-date in-text citations. The rules applied in order:

• Named author(s) present → (Family, Year) / (Family1 & Family2, Year) / (Family1 et al., Year) for 1, 2, or 3+ authors
• No named author → falls back to a short title: (Title Excerpt, Year) — you will never see a bare [N] leaking into author-date prose
• Institutional or organisation authors (e.g. Wikipedia "Contributors to Wikimedia projects", a government agency) → rendered as written, not broken into family name + initials
• Generic CMS bylines ("admin", "Editor", "Staff", "Editorial Team", and similar defaults) → treated as no author; the title-fallback applies — you will never see (admin, 2018)
• Grouped bracket markers (e.g. [5, 7] as some LLMs emit) → each number is extracted and converted independently — no leakage of bracket notation into author-date output

Web sources without structured metadata fall back to a numbered [N] + URL reference in the bibliography.

Clickable [N] markers

In the full-screen report viewer, clicking any [N] in-text marker scrolls to and highlights the corresponding source in the Cafe's Sources tab. On shared/standalone report pages (where there is no Sources tab), clicking a [N] scrolls down to the bibliography entry for that source.

Bibliography entries are also clickable — click any entry to open the original source URL in a new tab.

Converting the citation style

To change a report's citation style after generation:

1. Open the full-screen report viewer.
2. Use the Citation style dropdown to pick from APA 7, APA 6, MLA 9, Chicago Notes-Bibliography, Chicago Author-Date, Harvard, or IEEE.

   Tip: Hovering any style in the picker shows a concrete example — an in-text citation and a matching reference list entry — so you can preview the exact format before selecting.

3. Click Apply. The bibliography re-renders in the new style; in-text markers convert for author-date styles (APA, Harvard, MLA, Chicago-AD → (Author, Year) format) while numbered styles (IEEE, Vancouver) keep [N].
4. The new style is saved to the report and persists in the shared view.

This operation is idempotent — the raw [N] markers stored in the report body are never rewritten, so you can switch styles back and forth freely.

Copying and downloading

As of W1.44, the report viewer's actions live in ONE row below the report body, not a header strip — Copy, Download (.md), Download PDF, a native-format download for a slide deck or table (W1.32C), Save to Notebooks, Move to Workspace (W1.48), Share, Open full (pane only), Rewrite as… (W1.32C), Add to Tray, and Delete, left to right, reading actions first and the destructive one last:

• Copy — puts the full report text (body + bibliography, plain text) on your clipboard.
• Download (.md) — saves a .md file you can open in any Markdown editor, Notion, Obsidian, or Word.
• Download PDF (W54) — saves a single, book-grade A4 PDF: the same typeset design as a scribe's Quick Download export (serif body text, headings and tables rendered properly, a numbered bibliography with clickable citation URLs), generated entirely by code — no AI model is involved. Free for every signed-in user, no token cost.
• Download .pptx / Download .csv (W1.32C) — appears only on a document whose type has a native export: a Slide deck gets Download .pptx (opens directly in PowerPoint, Keynote, or Google Slides), and a Comparison table or Spreadsheet gets Download .csv (opens in Excel, Numbers, or Google Sheets). Every other document type shows no button here — the PDF and Markdown downloads are still there for those. Like the PDF, this is generated entirely by code (no AI model call) and costs no tokens.
• Save to Notebooks (W1.17) — saves the whole report as a note grouped under this Cafe's name in Notebooks. Works from the reading pane and the standalone report reader (/cafe/[cafeId]/artefact/[artefactId]). This is different from the Ask-AI popover's "Save to notebook", which only saves whatever passage you've highlighted. Owner-only — not shown on a shared/read-only report.

These are available in both the inline-expanded card view and the full-screen viewer. If you've shared the report, anyone you shared it with can download the PDF too — revoking sharing revokes their access to it. As of W1.32C, this now includes the .pptx / .csv native download too — a signed-in reader on a shared report link sees the same download button an owner does, for a deck or a table. Every report also carries a short AI-generated content notice at the bottom ("This report was generated with AI. AI can make mistakes — please verify important claims against the cited references."), shown even on shared/read-only views.

• Move to Workspace (W1.48) — turns this report into an editable scribe: pick a title, a scribe type, and how the headings map to chapters, then confirm. Every citation in the report carries across as a live [N] marker in the new scribe, and the report itself is left exactly as it was in the café. If any citation number in the report can't be matched to a source (for example the source was removed), it appears as [?] in your scribe and the import tells you how many. See Research → Writing → Publishing for the full walkthrough, including what happens when the report belongs to a café someone shared with you (you still get your own copy). Free — no token cost.

Auto-Write reports are also searchable in Ask Your Cafe (W1.17). A Grounded Q&A answer can now cite an Auto-Write report the same way it cites a source — click the citation to open the report in the reading pane.

The References bibliography is a collapsible disclosure, collapsed by default (W55.1) — click it to expand. This applies to every research report type (Auto-Write, Verify, Conflict, Find the Truth, and person research reports), and in the PDF the References section always starts on its own page.

Deleting a report

Open the report card and click the Delete button (trash icon). A confirmation prompt appears. Deleting a report does not delete the underlying sources — they remain in your Cafe's Sources tab.

Sharing a report

Every Auto-Write report can be shared with other signed-in Coffeescribe users via a share link.

How to share

1. Open a report in the reading pane and click Share in the action row below the body.
2. Alternatively, open the full-screen report page (Open full) and click Share there — same row, same place.
3. A dialog opens. Toggle Enable sharing on.
4. A share URL appears — click Copy to copy it.
5. Send the link to anyone with a Coffeescribe account.

What recipients can do

Recipients who open the share link:

• Read the full report body, citations, and bibliography
• Cannot edit, delete, or modify anything — the report is read-only
• Must be signed in to Coffeescribe — the link does not work for anonymous visitors

Revoking sharing

Toggle sharing off in the Share dialog. The link immediately stops working.

Important: The shared link does not carry any special permissions for the parent Cafe — recipients can only read the report, not access other sources in your Cafe unless you have separately shared the Cafe itself.

Long-running reports and error surfacing

Reports from cafes with more than 8 sources run multi-pass (planner → per-section writers → completeness critic), which can take several minutes. The setup keeps you informed:

• For the first 3 minutes the setup polls every 3 seconds. If your report arrives during this window it surfaces automatically — no refresh needed.
• After 3 minutes the setup shows "Still writing…" and switches to a slower 10-second poll for up to 10 minutes total. The report surfaces automatically when it completes, even if that's several minutes after you submitted.
• If a run fails (an upstream LLM error, a cost-cap breach with nothing to show, or an unexpected abort), the setup replaces the spinner with a clear error message. The run does not hang silently.

If you navigate away while a report is generating, come back to the Cafe — the report card will be visible in the Reports section as soon as the background job completes. As of W1.44, Auto-Write has no separate progress view in the centre column — its setup itself shows "Still writing…" while it polls, exactly as it did as a dialog; leaving the setup and coming back doesn't lose the run, because the report lands in the Reports tab regardless of whether the setup is still open.

Sparse-source warning

If any Auto-Write run — From Sources, Café, Tray + Sources, or From Tray — resolves to fewer than three usable sources, Auto-Write surfaces a sparse-source warning on the report. It's a heads-up that your current selection was too narrow — the report may lack depth. Widen your selection (add more sources to the Tray, tick more into Ask-Your-Café scope, or fold in another run), or go gather more with Professional research first.

Editing the bibliography

Every report has an Edit Bibliography button. Click it to open the Bibliography Editor at /cafe/[cafeId]/artefact/[artefactId]/bibliography:

• One card per citation. Each card shows a live preview of the rendered citation in the report's chosen style, plus an edit form for authors, title, journal, year, etc. Live preview updates on blur (debounced, not on every keystroke).
• Add Citation opens a manual entry form. Manual citations create a cafe_sources row of type manual_entry so the bibliography can include sources that didn't come from the search providers.
• Replace with new source re-opens the identifier-paste flow (DOI / ISBN / PMID / arXiv / ISSN / URL) so you can swap one citation for a freshly enriched source.
• Delete removes a citation from this report only — the underlying source stays in the Cafe.
• Export opens the Export Modal.

The Bibliography Editor is per-Report, not per-Cafe. Different reports in the same Cafe can have different bibliographies.

Export formats

The Export Modal supports four formats and lets you override the citation style per export — defaults to the report's style, but you can pick any of the 8 styles even if the report was written in a different one.

The 8 citation styles

W1.2 adds three styles to the five W1.1 shipped, bringing the total to 8:

Set the style at the Cafe level via Cafe Settings (behind the ⋯ menu in the Cafe's view bar — as of W1.42; previously a gear icon in the retired workspace toolbar); override per-export on the Export Modal.

Detecting conflicts between sources

W1.2 also adds Detect Conflicts next to Auto-Write. As of W1.44, reach it from ✦ Pro on the chat composer, under Interrogate. It runs an LLM (an AI language model) in the background that compares pairs of sources from your Cafe and flags any factual disagreements ("Source A says X; Source B says not-X"). Results land as a Conflict Report in the Cafe's Reports tab.

Scope

• Conflict Detect scans all sources currently in the Cafe — not just Tray items, not a specific report's sources.
• It is LLM-semantic — a plain-language way to say the model reads for meaning, not a keyword text match. The model reads both sources and decides whether they disagree on a checkable claim.
• It is pairwise — the cost scales O(n²) with source count, mitigated by a pre-filter that skips obviously unrelated pairs.
• Runs are rate-limited softly to one per 5 minutes per Cafe and hard-capped at $0.50 per run to prevent runaway cost on large Cafes.
• Runs in the background — you can keep using the Cafe while it works. You get an in-app toast when it completes with a link to the Conflict Report.

Using it

1. Click Detect Conflicts (⚡).
2. (Pro / Creator) Optionally expand Advanced to override the default model.
3. Click Run Detection. The button shows a spinner; a toast confirms the job started.
4. When the run completes (typically 10-60 seconds depending on source count), a second toast appears with a link to the Conflict Report.
5. The Conflict Report lists each detected disagreement with the two citations involved, so you can decide which (if any) to trust.

Conflict reports can be added to the Tray via a per-card button — same affordance as Auto-Write Reports — so you can fold "this is the disagreement" into a follow-up synthesis.

Token costs

Both Auto-Write and Detect Conflicts charge token costs that depend on source count and model. The Auto-Write setup shows the estimated cost and the active cap before you confirm — no surprises.

As of W1.18 Step 2, every Auto-Write mode's hard cap scales with source count (Topic mode's depth-scaled caps went away along with the tab — depth-scaled research cost now lives in Professional research). The cap is based on the number of sources in your final selection (after any granular selection or run-picking above), not the mode itself:

If a run would exceed the active cap, it is rejected before any cost is charged. For multi-pass runs (>8 sources), cost is checked after every LLM call — if the accumulator hits the cap mid-run, the report is stitched from completed sections and returned (never lost).

Soft rate-limit on Detect Conflicts: 5 minutes between runs per Cafe.

Re-using reports as Tray items

Each Auto-Write Report has a small Tray button (Inbox icon) next to its title in the Reports tab. Clicking it pulls the first ~500 chars of the report into the Serving Tray as a synthesis snippet, so you can:

• Feed it into another Auto-Write run as a Tray source
• Carry it through to your Scribe via the Workspace's Cafe Trays tab (in W1.3, also via Draft Scribe from Cafe)
• Reference it via @-mentions when writing in the Workspace

Conflict Reports support the same affordance from the amber section.

Adding a source by identifier (collapsible)

The existing identifier-paste input (DOI / ISBN / PMID / arXiv / ISSN / URL) is now wrapped in a collapsible Add Source by Identifier section in the Cafe header. It's collapsed by default; click to expand. Your expanded/collapsed preference is remembered per Cafe in localStorage, so the Cafes where you regularly paste identifiers stay open and the others stay tidy.

Empty-content source flow (Tray Confirm dialog)

When you click the Tray button on a source card whose body content is empty (e.g. an OpenAlex paper with no abstract), a confirmation dialog now opens with three options:

• Scrape full article — fires off an Apify URL scrape for the source's URL, populates the content, and adds it to the Tray. Costs a small URL-scrape fee.
• Add anyway — adds the source to the Tray as-is (just the metadata). Free.
• Cancel — closes the dialog.

This replaces the silent failure path where empty sources used to land in the Tray with nothing useful in them.

Tier availability

Auto-Write and Detect Conflicts both run on your token balance regardless of tier. If a run would push you over your balance, the pre-flight cost estimate warns you before submission.

Tips

• Hover the Metadata Health pill to understand what it means. The coloured pill (Full / Partial / URL only) on each source card now shows an explanation on hover — "Partial" means some fields like abstract or full author list are missing; "URL only" means only the web address was captured. Use this to decide which sources to enrich further before running Auto-Write.
• Curate before synthesising for the highest-quality reports. Use Professional research to discover, then move the best results into the Tray, then use From Tray mode to re-write strictly from those vetted sources. Two-pass workflow.
• Fold a whole prior run in with run-picking instead of re-curating. If you already ran Professional research or Find the Truth on a related angle, tick it in the "Choose sources" run-picker instead of copying sources into the Tray by hand.
• Mix sourced items and plain notes in the Tray — source-linked snippets get cited with [N] markers; your own observations (notes without a source) are woven in as observations. Both end up in the report, but only source-linked items appear in the bibliography.
• Set your citation style once per Cafe before running Auto-Write — the report bakes in the Cafe's style at generation time. You can still convert the style after generation using the dropdown in the full-screen viewer.
• Use Detect Conflicts before publishing a literature review. Even if it finds no conflicts, that's useful context. If it finds one, you know to address it in your writing.
• Pin reports to the Tray to chain them — a report can become an input for the next report. Multi-step synthesis without re-typing.
• Expand the report inline first before opening the full-screen view — it loads faster and you can highlight passages directly to the Tray without leaving the Cafe.
• Use the citation toggle to read the prose cleanly (citations hidden) and then enable them just for verification — especially useful for Summary and Explainer types where citations are off by default.
• Click [N] to trace the claim — in the full-screen viewer, clicking any [N] marker scrolls to and flashes the source in the Sources tab so you can verify the evidence directly.
• Convert citation style at any time — open the full-screen viewer, pick a style from the dropdown, and click Apply. Switch between APA author-date and IEEE numbered freely — the stored report is never rewritten.
• Download the report as Markdown, or as a polished PDF — the Download (.md) button saves a .md file you can import into Notion, Obsidian, or any Markdown editor, complete with full bibliography. The Download PDF button (W54) instead saves a single book-grade PDF with the same typeset design as a scribe export — no import step, ready to read or print as-is.
• Use Comparison table for decision-making — when your question is "which option is better?", the comparison table format gives you a scannable side-by-side view with citations inside the cells.
• Use Slide deck for presentations — the slide deck format produces a one-H2-per-slide outline you can paste directly into your slides tool. Each slide has a title and bullet points.
• Turn on confidence signalling for contested topics — when evidence is thin or mixed, the confidence option makes the model flag uncertainty explicitly rather than presenting everything as settled fact.
• Add "What we couldn't determine" — for academic or high-stakes work, this option appends a transparent section on open questions and evidence gaps.
• Share a report with a collaborator using the Share button in the expanded card or the full-screen view. They need a Coffeescribe account to open it. Toggle sharing off at any time to revoke access.
• Ready to write? Click Move to Workspace to turn the report into an editable scribe with every citation intact — the report itself stays untouched in the café, so you can keep researching and move it again later if the report changes. See Research → Writing → Publishing for the full walkthrough.
• Paste a DOI to get the full article body — the identifier enrichment now automatically attempts to scrape readable content after metadata lookup. Paywalled publishers may only return the abstract, but open-access articles often include the full text.
• Sparse-source warnings are honest signals. When Auto-Write tells you a topic returned only two sources, that usually means the topic is genuinely under-researched or your providers don't cover the right corner — broaden or enable Apify Actors.
• BibTeX/RIS round-trips cleanly to Zotero, Mendeley, and EndNote. Try it once with a small report before committing to a workflow.
• Not sure which of the 19 types to pick? Start from what you'll DO with the document — reading alone → Report or Brief; presenting to others → Slide deck; deciding between options → Comparison table; teaching or self-study → Study guide, Lesson, or Quiz/flashcards; publishing → Article/blog post or Press release. The gallery's five category headings (Core, Present & compare, Analyse, Learn, Communicate) are the same grouping.
• Turn a finished report into a slide deck without re-researching. Click Rewrite as…, pick Slide deck, and Auto-Write writes a new deck from the same sources — no new Professional research run, billed as one ordinary write.
• A .pptx deck opens plainly in PowerPoint today — real slides, real bullets, real hyperlinks, but no theme or design applied. Treat it as a structured starting point, not a finished presentation.
• Set Style and Tone once, then reuse them via Rewrite as… — a document's style/tone carries forward the same way its type does; open the Style & tone box on a rewrite to see what it inherited.