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A reading list needs to stay current and cover its blind spots, but it’s hard to know what you’re missing without starting over. This tutorial runs a gap analysis on a ~20-paper Collection about muscle development in athletes, then fills the gaps from the full index. You’ll learn how to:
  1. Generate a research gaps matrix scoped to a single Collection
  2. Identify missing topics, populations, and methodologies
  3. Find recent papers that fill those gaps and save them to the Collection

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Before you start

Open My Library. If your papers aren’t in Consensus yet, use Add papers to import from Zotero (entire library, sub-collections, and full text), upload BibTeX, RIS, or PDF files, or paste DOIs. Everything you import is private to you.

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Step 1: Ask for a gaps matrix over the Collection

With the Collection open, it’s already attached to the search bar. (From anywhere else, click + in the search bar to attach it.)
Research Agent samples papers from the Collection, runs four searches within it to gather the papers related to your topic (so the Collection doesn’t need to be tidy), reads them, and returns a visual matrix of topics × populations. In the example: good coverage of adult male resistance training, nothing on female, youth, or elite athletes.
You can specify the axes: “create a research gaps matrix that looks at [variable A] by [variable B]”.

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Step 2: Search the full index to fill the gaps

Remove the Collection from the search bar (click × on it, or set Corpus to All) so Consensus searches the whole index rather than just your attachments.
Consensus keeps the gaps from the previous answer as context, runs one search per gap in parallel with a 5-year recency filter, deduplicates, and shortlists 20 papers from 178 eligible ones. Add extra constraints if you want: female athletes only, Q1 journals only, a specific country.

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Step 3: Save the results

  • Hover a citation and click bookmark to save it to the Collection.
  • Or open References, select several papers, and save them in one go.
  • Save the whole thread to your Library to come back to it later.
Repeat this over time to keep a Collection current.
The video description mentions regenerative agriculture; the recorded demo uses a Collection on muscle development in athletes.

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Getting papers into a Collection

Click Add papers in the top right of My Library:
The Add papers menu in My Library

Upload PDF, RIS, or BibTeX files, paste DOIs, or import from Zotero.

  1. Click Import Zotero and then Create key on Zotero. Zotero opens a pre-filled New Key page titled “Consensus”.
  2. Click Save Key and copy the key; it’s shown once.
  3. Paste it into Consensus, click Next, review the collections it found, and click Import Zotero library.
The Setup Zotero import dialog in Consensus
The Import from Zotero dialog listing collections and paper counts

Review your Zotero collections before importing. Only journal articles are used in search.

Imported collections appear as blue Connected collections that keep your Zotero folder structure. Import is one-way and manual: click any Import from Zotero button again to pull in new papers. Both personal and group libraries work, with no size limit. PDFs stored in Zotero come along; externally linked files don’t.
My Library sidebar showing a connected Zotero collection and a regular collection

Connected collections (blue) next to regular collections.

Up to 20 PDFs at a time, 50 MB each, text-based (scanned or image-only PDFs can’t be processed). RIS and BibTeX files import their references. Uploads are private unless you share a Collection containing them.

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Ask a Collection from inside My Library

Open the Collection and type in the search bar at the bottom. The Collection is attached automatically, so only its papers are used. From the main search page, click + to attach a Collection or Corpus › My Library for everything you’ve saved. Both run as Pro or Deep messages.
A Collection in My Library with the scoped search bar highlighted

Inside a Collection, the search bar is already scoped to its papers.

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Save several results at once

Select papers in the References panel or in My Library, then use the download arrow to export a Bibliography, CSV, or RIS, or the bookmark to file them into a Collection.
Several papers selected in My Library with the export menu open

Deep Search over your Library

Snowball a reading list