The craft of research, taught and tracked

The Craft of Research, in one platform.

Most research platforms cover one slice — citations, screening, a survey tool, a writing app. Eidolon Research covers the whole craft — literature review, methodology and ethics, experiments and analytics, writing and synthesis — taught and tracked together, with the Quad's four specialists and a Senior Consensus Reviewer over your shoulder. The Literature Review module is live now and competes with EndNote on the dimensions that matter; the rest of the craft ships over the beta. Founding-researcher pricing locks in for life.

Founding-researcher beta pricing — locks in until v1.
Lit Review module · live now
PRISMA flow · per theme
Identification
1,247
After dedup
892
Title / abstract screen
204
Quad-assisted
Full-text eligibility
68
Included in synthesis
42
Auto-generated. Audit trail preserved forever.

Four phases. One platform. Honest about what ships when.

Real research runs in parallel — your ethics application drafts alongside your lit review, your methodology informs your experiments, your writing pulls from all of it. The platform's phases are surfaces you move between, not steps in lockstep. Founding-researcher pricing locks until every phase below is live.

Available now
📚

Literature Review

The lit-review module that's already an EndNote-class workspace, with PRISMA discipline and the Quad's four specialists doing the screening alongside you.

PRISMA workflow · three-tier themes · auto-generated rubric · Quad-assisted screening · thematic matrix · audit trail forever.

Read more →
Coming soon
🧪

Methodology & Ethics

Design your study. Draft the ethics application alongside your lit review (because real ethics committees take months and the work can't wait). Pre-registration with a one-shot lock; ethics with living revision history. Methodology Compile turns your design into validation gates the platform enforces.

Concurrent with lit review · institutional ethics templates · pre-registration · validation gates · Quad-reviewed.

What's coming →
Coming soon
📈

Experiments & Analytics

Reproducible runs of your designed methodology — surveys, experiments, established methods, the work itself. The Analytics runner turns results into interpretations you can defend, not just outputs you have to explain.

Reproducible execution · structured outputs · interpretation discipline · Quad-reviewed.

What's coming →
Available now (basic)v2 coming
✍️

Writing & Synthesis

A writing surface with your literature, your matrix, your data, and your citations all one click away. v1 ships the basics; v2 turns the writing canvas into the busy-but-easy hub where every piece of evidence you've collected sits within arm's reach.

Inline citations · matrix-aware drafting · cite-as-you-go · calibrated confidence in every claim.

Read more →

Universities don't cover the craft of research rigorously.

Most postgrads are handed Covidence, an ethics-form template, an SPSS install, and a deadline. They learn the tools, not the craft — and produce work that fails reproducibility checks at submission. Eidolon Research closes that gap: every workspace is a learning surface, every step explains why, and the Quad checks your work as you go.

Framework-first. Hard-gated. Pedagogical by design.

Junior researchers do searches blindly and pile up irrelevant hits. Eidolon's framework-first gate makes you define the themes before you search — because that's what systematic reviewers actually do. Power-users move fast; juniors learn the method.

This is the lit-review module's workflow. Methodology, experiments, and writing each have their own — flagged in the Phase Map above. Phases run in parallel: you can draft your ethics application alongside your lit review, because real ethics committees don't wait.

1

Define your primary themes

Hard gate — no searching until your Tier 1 themes are pinned. Secondary and other emergent themes come later, from the literature itself. See the three-tier theme structure ↓

2

Quad-assisted search building

The Quad proposes a Boolean expression with synonym OR-groups + truncation + year filter, and explains why. Read the reasoning to learn; skip past it once you don't need to.

3

Harvest from open APIs

OpenAlex + Crossref + arXiv. Boolean-query support, reproducible counts, no scraping. Your search is replicable.

4

Quad-assisted screening

At title/abstract and full-text, the Quad votes with confidence. Theme-context prompts mean a paper might be in for one theme and out for another. You resolve the disagreements.

5

PRISMA diagram + thematic matrix

Diagram auto-generated per-theme and combined for journal submission. Included papers flow into the matrix for synthesis. Audit trail preserved forever.

Themes are taught. Reading is taught.

Two features turn every step of a literature review into a methodology lesson — the lit-review module's pedagogical signature. Both are unique to Eidolon Research. (Methodology, experiments, and writing each get their own pedagogy when those modules ship.)

1 · Theme structure

Three tiers — three different ways themes enter a review.

Most platforms treat themes as one undifferentiated bag. Eidolon Research separates them into three tiers, because each is doing different epistemic work.

  • Tier 1

    Primary themes

    From your reading of the research problem. You pin them at project setup; the framework gate enforces it. Searches are built against these.

  • Tier 2

    Secondary themes

    Emergent from the literature, filtered for relevance to your problem definition. The Quad surfaces them; you confirm. Picked-up secondary themes refine the rubric below.

  • Tier 3

    Other emergent themes

    Serendipitous — relevant to the field but outside your problem definition. Logged and tagged so they don't get lost; available for future projects, side-papers, or thesis "future work" sections.

2 · Reading discipline

The Literature Assessment Rubric.

Auto-generated from your primary and secondary themes. Every paper in your collection gets the same disciplined evaluation — so you stop reading once and forgetting, and start reading systematically. Junior researchers learn what experienced reviewers do; senior reviewers move faster because the questions are pre-formed.

Reading rubric · "Adaptive learning in primary education"
Does this paper define adaptivity compatibly with my framing?
What evidence is offered for the proposed adaptation mechanism?
Is the population overlap with KS1–KS2 large enough to extrapolate?
Does the paper address safeguarding constraints? (emergent)
Is teacher-supervisor agency preserved? (emergent)
Generated from your themes. Updates as Tier 2 grows.

You run the research. The AI helps at task level — never instead of you.

Eidolon Research will not execute your research for you. You define the framework. You make the calls. You write the synthesis. The AI assists with sub-tasks — Boolean expansion, screening votes, theme operationalisation, rubric application, methodology validation, experiment execution — but never runs the work itself. The point isn't to skip the work; the point is to do the work better, with a coach over your shoulder.

What ships today.

The Lit Review module is live in v1. The other phases of the craft — methodology, experiments, writing — ship over the beta. See the Phase Map above and the roadmap below for what's coming.

The Literature Review module already competes with EndNote on the dimensions that matter — harvesting from OpenAlex, Crossref, and arXiv; deduplication; full-text screening; PRISMA flow; thematic synthesis; citation export. It adds three things EndNote doesn't: the Quad's four specialists in the screening loop, the auto-generated reading rubric, and a methodology pedagogy that teaches the review as you do it. Sub-£10/month for students; locks at founding-researcher pricing for life.

Coming from EndNote? Import your .enw library and PRISMA picks up where you left off. (Subject to import-format availability — see Roadmap.)

📚

Literature workspace

Full PRISMA workflow + Quad-assisted screening. Per-theme + combined diagrams. Audit trail forever. Manual + BibTeX import alongside the PRISMA pipeline.

📊

Thematic Matrix Analytics

Cells reference papers from your curated collection. Quad / LLM grading on demand. Surface gaps, contradictions, and emergent themes the matrix can see and you can't.

✍️

Writing workspace

Long-form drafting alongside your matrix and collection. Cite-as-you-go. Calibrated confidence in every claim. Don't write what you can't defend.

📄

Export

PRISMA flow diagram (per-theme + combined). Thesis appendix. BibTeX. Markdown. Everything you need at submission, generated from the audit trail.

🎓

"Why this step?" tooltips

Every PRISMA stage has a Why? button. Review-type-aware: mandatory vs recommended vs optional changes between systematic, scoping, narrative, integrative.

🔄

All four review types in v1

Systematic (PRISMA 2020), Scoping (PRISMA-ScR), Narrative (simplified PRISMA-style), Integrative (hybrid PRISMA-style). Pick the type at project start; the workflow adapts.

🤖

AI Usage & Engagement scoring

Every AI-assisted action tracked against a universally adopted AI Usage framework. Researcher engagement scored alongside. Export the full report at submission — declare exactly what the AI did and what you did, with an evidence trail. The transparent answer to "did you use AI?"

📜

Document version history

Every write to your literature review, matrix, and thesis chapters is versioned. Export a complete change log at submission — the audit trail your examiner expects, generated automatically from the work you were already doing.

🎯

Encouragement & compulsory tasks

The system actively pushes you forward — surfaces what's next, nudges where you've stalled. And it stipulates compulsory tasks at every stage: define themes before you search, apply the rubric to every paper, log AI use as it happens. Not optional steps you can skip — the methodology you needed to follow anyway, baked into the workflow.

Four specialists in the Quad. One Senior Consensus Reviewer above it.

Most "AI assistants" give you one opinion and call it advice. Eidolon Research gives you five — four independent specialists examining your work from four angles, and a fifth role that reads all four and writes the resolution.

The four specialists make up the Quad. Each comes at the work from a different lens. They don't see each other's output. Above them sits the Senior Consensus Reviewer — not a specialist, a synthesiser. It reads all four, reconciles where possible, flags genuine disagreement, and writes a concrete plan you can act on.

You resolve the calls. The Quad assists, explains, and surfaces what would otherwise be tacit. Junior reviewers learn what experienced reviewers do; senior reviewers ship faster because the surface area is pre-explored.

The Quad reviews work in every phase of the craft, not just literature work. When the Methodology workspace ships, the same four specialists evaluate your study design — Coverage analyses whether your design covers the research questions, Methodology audits the operationalisation, Critical Reviewer takes the thesis-examiner stance, Equity & Bias examines who your study can and can't generalise to. When Experiments ship, the Quad reviews your runs. When you write, the Quad reviews your draft. Same architecture, every phase.

1

Coverage Analyst

Does the framework cover every aspect of your problem? Is every research question addressed by at least one theme? Are there literature areas falling outside all themes?

2

Methodological Auditor

Are your themes at the right level of abstraction? Is there overlap or redundancy? Can each be operationalised in the matrix? Are they specific enough to discriminate between papers?

3

Critical Reviewer

Thesis-examiner perspective. Can the framework expose gaps? Reveal tensions and contradictions? Support "to what extent has the literature addressed this problem?" Will it pass viva scrutiny?

4

Equity & Bias Auditor

Who is represented in this body of literature — and who isn't? Examines sample bias, cultural assumptions baked into the framework, generalisability beyond the studied groups, and whether marginalised perspectives are addressed. Every review requires this lens.

↓ Synthesis layer · outside the Quad
Σ

Senior Consensus Reviewer

Reads all four specialist evaluations. Reconciles where possible, flags disagreement, and writes a concrete, actionable improvement plan — "add theme X under Y", "split Z" — not vague advice.

Default Quad lineup. The fourth slot is configurable per project — swap in a Reproducibility Auditor, Statistical Auditor, Ethics Reviewer, or any specialist the work calls for.

Eidolon observes. It doesn't collect.

Other research tools — Google Scholar, the AI assistants, the citation-cloud platforms — ingest your work into pipelines you don't see, to train models, target ads, or refine retention metrics. Eidolon doesn't. Your literature, your matrix, your draft, your data sit in storage you own, in a record you can inspect, dispute, export, and delete.

When the Quad gets a screening call wrong, you push back — and the twin learns from the disagreement. It's a conversation, not a one-way pipe.

Inspect. Dispute. Export. Delete. Anytime, without losing access to the platform.

The full craft, on a roadmap.

Every phase is committed. Founding-researcher pricing locks in until every workspace below is live — buy in beta, lock the price for the full platform, for life.

Live in v1
  • Literature workspace — PRISMA + Quad-assisted screening
  • Thematic Matrix Analytics
  • Quad / LLM grading
  • Writing workspace (basic)
  • Export (PRISMA flow + thesis appendix)
Coming over the beta
  • Methodology workspace — teaches research design
  • Methodology Compile — validation gates
  • Execution runner — reproducible runs
  • Analytics runner — interpretation discipline
  • Writing workspace v2 — busy-but-easy hub with literature, matrix, data, citations one click away

Founding-researcher pricing.

Lock in beta pricing until v1 ships — every plan, every month, no hidden ramp. v1 means every phase of the craft live — Literature Review now, then methodology, experiments, and the Writing v2 surface over the beta. Buy in beta, lock the price for the full platform, for life.

Student

For postgrads & coursework reviews

£6 /month
List £8/mo · save with annual at £59/yr
  • All four review types
  • PRISMA workflow + Quad-assisted screening
  • Thematic matrix + Quad/LLM grading
  • Writing workspace + export
  • Beta pricing locks until v1
Start as Student
Coming v1.1

Team

For supervisors & research groups

£49 /month
List £64/mo · annual £499/yr · founding price locks at launch
  • Everything in Pro
  • Pooled quotas across the team (live in v1)
  • Multi-seat collaboration (rolling out v1.1)
  • Supervisor dashboards (rolling out v1.1)
  • Founding-Team pricing locks at launch
Notify me at launch
University & institution licences available — bulk Student seats and Team supervisor packs. Contact us.