Help

Questions people ask

How Carrel handles your papers, what a cited answer is, what it will and will not write for you, how teams and billing work, and where your data is stored. If yours is not here, ask in the community server — the link is at the foot of this page.

Getting started

What is Carrel, in one sentence?: A workspace for the whole literature review: you bring the papers, Carrel reads and organises them, shows you what they agree and disagree on, and drafts from the passages behind each claim — with every citation a link back to the page it came from.
Who is it for?: PhD and master’s researchers writing a literature review, a thesis chapter, a journal article or a conference paper, and the labs and supervisors around them. It assumes you already know your field; it is not a tool for finding out what to study.
How do I get my papers in?: Four ways: upload PDFs, paste a DOI or an arXiv identifier, import a Zotero library or a few of its collections, or drop a folder in. Metadata is filled in from Crossref and OpenAlex, so you do not retype authors and venues.
Do I have to leave Zotero?: No. Import a library or a few collections with their PDFs whenever you like; papers already in Carrel are skipped, so the import can be run again. Zotero stays your reference manager if you want it to.
How long does a paper take to be ready?: A PDF is parsed, split into passages and indexed within a couple of minutes of upload for a typical paper. You can read and annotate it immediately; searching and asking questions wait for the indexing to finish, and the library shows you which papers are still processing.
Is there an app for my phone?: Not yet. Carrel runs in the browser and is built for the screen you write on. The reader works on a tablet.

Evidence and citations

How do I know the citations are real?: Every citation is a link to a specific passage in a paper you imported, not a string a model typed. Click it and the reader opens at that page. Nothing is asserted without a source, and when the evidence is not in your library the assistant says so rather than guessing.
What happens if my papers do not answer the question?: You are told. That is a deliberate design choice and it costs us better-looking demos: an answer built from a model’s training data is unciteable and unverifiable, and it is exactly the sentence you cannot defend later. “None of your papers speak to this” is also useful information — it is either a gap in your folder or a gap in the field.
What is the research graph for?: Claims, methods and findings are extracted from your papers with their exact quotes, then linked by what supports, contradicts, qualifies or extends what. Those relations are what make a review paragraph argue instead of list — when you draft, a contradiction comes through as contrast rather than as another item in a sequence.
Will it catch me if my writing drifts from the source?: It will flag it. Because a citation is a link to a passage, the sentence and the evidence can be compared — so when a paragraph you have tightened no longer says what its source says, Carrel tells you and you can open the passage and decide.
Can it be wrong?: Yes, and we would rather say so. Extraction can misread a table or a figure caption, a retrieved passage can be the wrong one, and a model can misinterpret a passage it is looking straight at. What the design buys you is that every one of those is one click from being checked.

Writing and handing over

Will it write my literature review for me?: No, and it is not trying to. It gets you past the blank page: the papers read and indexed, the claims extracted with their quotes, the agreements and contradictions mapped, and a first draft of a section you chose, cited to the passages behind it. The argument is yours.
What does a drafted section actually look like?: Prose written only from passages in your own project, with a citation marker on each claim that links to the passage behind it. It is a first draft: grounded, cited, and not finished. You rewrite it, cut it, and argue with it.
Which citation styles are supported?: APA, MLA, Chicago, IEEE and Nature. Because a citation is a link rather than typed text, switching style re-renders the document and the bibliography rather than asking you to redo them.
How do I get my work out?: Word (.docx), LaTeX, Markdown and BibTeX. The Word export carries tracked changes that open as tracked changes in Word, attributed to the right person — so a supervisor marks it up the way they always have, with nothing to install and no account to create.
Can I use my own manuscript template?: You can export to Word or LaTeX and drop the text into your department’s template. Carrel does not try to be your typesetter.

Supervisors and labs

How do I add my supervisor or my lab?: Invite them from inside Carrel and the workspace moves to Team, billed per seat from that point. Shared projects, reading assignments and review queues come with it, and whoever holds the grant can take over the billing.
Can my supervisor see everything I do?: Only what you share with them. Access is per project, with a role attached — a supervisor sees the projects they are a member of, not your account.
Does my university need to buy it for me?: No. Most people start on their own account. If your department or library wants to buy for a cohort, there is an Enterprise plan with single sign-on, usage reporting, security review and a purchase order.

Plans and billing

Is there a student price?: Yes. Pro is $60 for the year on a verified .edu or university address — $5 a month, and about two thirds off the standard yearly price. If you would rather not commit to a year, the 6-month thesis pass is $90 paid once, with nothing to cancel.
What does billing yearly save?: 30% against paying monthly — Pro is $14 a month billed yearly instead of $20, so $168 rather than $240. The yearly trial is longer too: 20 days instead of 14.
What counts as a cited answer?: One question to the research assistant, answered from your own papers with page citations. Reading, highlighting, extraction and searching are never metered. If a heavy month runs Pro out, 500 more answers are $5; Team and Enterprise are uncapped.
Do I have to pay to try it?: No. Every plan starts with a free trial — 14 days on monthly billing, 20 on yearly. A card is required to start one and nothing is charged until it ends, so cancel before then and you pay nothing.

Your data

Who can see my papers?: Only you and the members of the projects you share. PDFs live in private storage behind expiring links, and isolation is enforced in the database itself rather than only in the application, so a bug in the app cannot hand somebody else your library.
Do you train AI models on my research?: No. Not us, and not our AI provider — we use their API under terms that exclude API data from model training. Your passages are used to answer your questions and nobody else’s.
Where is my data stored?: The database, the file storage and the functions that read them are in Frankfurt, in the European Union. The full list of providers and what each one holds is in the privacy policy.
What happens to my work if I stop paying?: It is still yours. Export everything — papers, notes, manuscripts and bibliographies — at any time, including after a subscription ends, and delete it whenever you want.