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Describe your research topic and Anara finds relevant papers, proposes imports you approve, creates a project folder, and runs your first query across everything at once. The ten-minute setup that makes everything else in Anara work. For researchers starting a new project or moving an existing one into Anara for the first time.

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1. Describe the task

Anara is most useful when it has your papers. The problem is that uploading papers one by one, naming folders, and then figuring out what to ask first takes long enough that many researchers skip the setup and go straight to questions. Answers to questions without a library are generic. Answers grounded in your actual papers are specific and citable. This setup prompt does the work in one pass. You describe your topic and what you are trying to produce. Anara searches for papers in the academic index, proposes a set of imports, creates a folder for your project, and runs the first meaningful query across the imported papers. By the end you have a working research library and at least one substantive answer. Organizing papers into a folder before asking questions dramatically improves result quality. Anara can scope searches to a folder, which means it covers all the papers in that folder rather than sampling from your entire library. Without the folder, results from a large library can drift toward papers you uploaded for other projects. Here a master’s student in public health is starting a systematic review on school-based mental health interventions and needs to build the evidence library from scratch. 
I'm starting a systematic review on school-based mental health interventions for adolescents aged 12 to 18. I'm looking for peer-reviewed papers from the last ten years, with priority on RCTs and systematic reviews.

Step 1: Search for the fifteen most relevant papers on this topic from your academic index. Show me the titles, authors, year, and a one-sentence abstract summary for each.
Step 2: After I approve which papers to import, create a folder called "School Mental Health Interventions" and place the imported papers there.
Step 3: Once the papers are imported, run this first query: what are the most common outcome measures used across these interventions, and which studies report the strongest effect sizes?

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2. Give Anara context

Required context
  • Nothing to upload. The setup prompt carries the setup.
Optional context
  • A specific database to search first (PubMed, bioRxiv). Anara searches these before the general academic index if you name them.
  • Papers you already have uploaded elsewhere. Tell Anara which folder they are in so it can move them or include them in the new project folder.

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3. What Anara creates

A proposed list of papers for you to review and approve, a project folder, and the first substantive answer to a cross-library question. The setup itself is the deliverable. What follows is a research library organized for your project, which makes every subsequent query faster and more specific. You do not have to repeat the setup; the folder persists across sessions.

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4. Follow-up prompts

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Filter the proposal

When Anara’s paper list includes studies that do not fit your inclusion criteria. 
From the proposed imports, remove any papers that are not empirical studies. Keep only papers that report primary data, not reviews or commentaries. Show me the revised list before importing.
When your project has a sub-topic that benefits from its own search scope. 
Create a second folder called "Measurement Tools" for papers that specifically develop or validate scales used in adolescent mental health research. Search for five relevant papers and propose imports.

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Ask the first research question

When the library is set up and you are ready to start the actual literature work. 
Across all papers in my "School Mental Health Interventions" folder, which interventions show consistent effects across multiple studies, and which have conflicting findings? Cite the specific papers for each pattern you identify.

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5. Tricks, tips, and troubleshooting

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How you word your prompt shapes what you get

Naming a database alongside a topic tells Anara to search that source first rather than the general academic index. For clinical and biomedical topics, naming PubMed directly produces results that are better filtered to peer-reviewed medical literature. For preprints and emerging work, naming bioRxiv or medRxiv targets those servers specifically. If you want papers from a specific time window, state the year range in the prompt. The academic index covers 240 million papers and returns the most relevant without a date filter; adding one narrows results to the window that matters for your review.

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Check the output against your own understanding

You approve which papers get imported. Read the one-sentence abstracts in the proposal before confirming. Anara retrieves papers with verified DOIs and confirmed PDF availability, but relevance is a judgment call only you can make for your specific research question. If the proposals miss an important paper you already know, add it by DOI after the initial import. If the proposals include papers at the wrong level of specificity (too broad, too narrow), adjust the query before the next batch.

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What to do with the output next

Once the folder is set up, it stays available across all your sessions with Anara. You do not need to re-upload papers each time. Subsequent queries can be scoped to this folder directly: “search only in my School Mental Health Interventions folder.” When you add new papers later, import them into the same folder and they become part of every subsequent query automatically.