> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.consensus.app/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Answer one question with many parallel searches

> Decompose a research question into multiple search angles, gather evidence across all of them, and distill one cited answer.

## What you get

The retrieval pattern behind a good "ask a research question" feature: one user question becomes many angles, each angle its own search, and the results merge into a single summary the user can trace back to papers.

## Who it's for

Product engineers building research answers into an application — the difference between this and a single search is the difference between a demo and a product.

## How Phylo runs it

[Phylo](https://consensus.app/home/community-voices/phylo/)'s agents make parallel calls across multiple angles of a question, gather the relevant papers, and distill the results into a summary for the user. The workflow starts wherever the researcher is:

| Step | What happens                                                                  |
| ---- | ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| 1    | A biology question is defined — a hypothesis, a GWAS hit, or a dataset signal |
| 2    | The agent generates multiple search angles for better coverage                |
| 3    | Consensus returns evidence across those retrieval paths                       |
| 4    | The agent distills it into a usable research answer                           |

> "It's very robust, with almost zero errors. It gives you genuinely useful results, and it embeds into a high-throughput agentic workflow easily."
>
> — **Kexin Huang**, Co-founder & CEO, Phylo

## Generating good angles

This is where the quality lives. A weak decomposition produces five rephrasings of the same query; a strong one covers genuinely different retrieval paths.

<Steps>
  <Step title="Vary the axis, not just the wording">
    Cover the mechanism, the population, the outcome, the competing explanation, and the methodology. Five paraphrases of one angle retrieve nearly the same papers and give false confidence in coverage.
  </Step>

  <Step title="Include the null and the contradiction">
    Add an angle phrased toward the opposite finding. Searching only for confirmation returns confirmation, and users notice when your product never disagrees with them.
  </Step>

  <Step title="Use the field's terminology, not the user's">
    The user's phrasing is rarely what the literature indexes under. Translate first — a reconnaissance search to learn the vocabulary, then the real angles.
  </Step>

  <Step title="Bound the concurrency to your tier">
    "Parallel" here means angles, not simultaneous calls: there is a one-query-per-second limit on every plan except Enterprise, so issue the searches sequentially. See [rate limits](/use-cases/best-practices#rate-limits-and-result-caps).
  </Step>

  <Step title="Merge on DOI and keep the angle that found it">
    A paper surfaced by several independent angles is a stronger signal than one found by a single query — that count is worth surfacing in the answer.
  </Step>
</Steps>

## Distilling without losing the thread

The synthesis step is where grounding usually breaks:

* **Group by finding, not by paper.** A paper-by-paper summary is a reading list; grouping by finding with the supporting papers attached is an answer.
* **Attach a citation to every claim** and drop sentences you cannot support. Make "the literature does not settle this" a real output.
* **Show which angles were searched.** It tells the user what was and was not covered, and it is the cheapest trust-building thing you can render.
* **Report disagreement.** Where angles returned conflicting evidence, say so rather than averaging it into a confident middle.

## What to check before you trust it

* **Inspect the generated angles on real questions.** If they are paraphrases, fix the decomposition prompt — no amount of retrieval quality compensates.
* **Test a question with a genuinely contested answer.** The output should surface the conflict, not resolve it silently.
* **Watch merge behaviour on near-duplicates.** Preprint and published versions of the same work can carry different DOIs.
* **Measure it.** Use a [benchmark](/use-cases/benchmark-retrieval) to check whether more angles actually improve recall, or just cost more.

## Related

<CardGroup cols={2}>
  <Card title="Screen thousands of target-disease pairs for evidence" icon="table-cells" href="/use-cases/high-throughput-screening">
    The batch counterpart, on the same infrastructure.
  </Card>

  <Card title="Add a citable evidence layer to an agent you already ship" icon="plug" href="/use-cases/add-an-evidence-layer">
    Wiring this into an agent you have already built.
  </Card>

  <Card title="Best practices" icon="shapes" href="/use-cases/best-practices">
    Fan-out and merge, rate limits, and the five primitives.
  </Card>

  <Card title="All use cases" icon="grid-2" href="/use-cases">
    Browse the gallery by persona.
  </Card>
</CardGroup>