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Turn a pile of articles into an AI research notebook
Load your articles, PDFs and links into NotebookLM and ask questions answered only from your sources, with citations you can click.
When to use it
When you're researching one topic over several weeks
Step by step
Gather your sources
Collect the articles, reports and PDFs you trust on the topic. Save PDFs to a Google Drive folder so they're in one place.
Create a notebook
Open NotebookLM (free with a Google account), create a new notebook and add your sources: upload files, pick them from Drive or paste website links.
Ask questions from your sources
Type questions in the chat. Answers come with numbered citations that jump to the exact passage. Try this to start.
Prompt to copyUsing only these sources, give me: 1) the 5 main themes across them, 2) where the sources agree and disagree, 3) the key figures or statistics with which source each comes from, 4) the questions these sources don't answer about [my specific question].Click the citations
Check a few citations to make sure the answer matches the passage. It sticks to your sources, but it can still misread them.
Save useful answers
Save good answers as notes in the notebook so your findings build up as you go.
What you get
Themes: 1) four-day week trials report lower sick leave [1][3]; 2) mixed effects on customer response times [2]... Disagreement: [1] reports productivity up; [4] found no change. Not covered: effects on very small teams under 5 people.
Tips
- Only upload documents you're allowed to share with an online tool; keep confidential work files out unless your workplace approves it.