PDF
Your PDF
Paste your PDF. Nothing to upload.
←PDF
Make a literature review
Turn PDFs into a literature review
Twenty papers, one table of what they actually disagree about.
Free to try, no card. Your PDF opens in Ancher.
Document structure in orderPage numbersTables as tables
Kept in parts
Every one of these stays separately addressable instead of collapsing into one block of text.
ScopeThemesMethod comparisonGaps
Literature review
A synthesis across several works: what is agreed, what is contested, what nobody has tested.
A literature review is not a stack of summaries; it is a claim about where a field agrees, where it does not, and what nobody has tested. Ancher keeps each paper's own structure so a methods section can be compared against another methods section, holds tables as tables so sample sizes stay attached to the studies they belong to, and puts a page number on every element.
The honest version
The disagreement is in the methods, and flattening deletes the methods
Two papers reporting opposite results usually differ in how they measured, not in what they found. That difference lives in a methods section and often in a table — the sample, the window, the exclusion criteria. Extraction that returns one long string loses the boundary between methods and discussion, and with it the only explanation for the contradiction.
One page of one PDF, at p. 11, read two ways.Illustrative. The figure is invented; the gap it falls into is not.
the effect was robust across specifications, though as noted the sample
In Table 3 — not readThe specific never reaches the draft
Literature review
In Table 3
n=214, urban only
from p. 11
Lands in the draft, with its timecode
- Section structure survives ingest, so methods can be read against methods rather than against a blur of prose.
- Tables stay tables, keeping a sample size attached to the study that reported it.
- Every claim carries a page number, so a reviewer holding the same file can check it.
What comes out
Literature review, section by section
A synthesis across several works: what is agreed, what is contested, what nobody has tested.
Scope
What this set of papers covers and, explicitly, what it does not.
Themes
What holds across studies, kept apart from what one paper found.
Method comparison
How each study measured, side by side, since that is where contradictions usually resolve.
Gaps
Questions the set raises and none of them tests.
Bibliography
Every source with page-level anchors for the claims drawn from it.
Papers-to-literature-review prompt
The link on its own gets a summary. This is the instruction that produces the 5 sections above, in that order, with the rules that keep them honest. Paste it with your PDFs — in Ancher, or in whatever assistant you already use.
Synthesise these papers. (1) State the scope, and what the set does not cover. (2) Separate what holds across studies from what one paper found. (3) Put the methods side by side, since contradictions usually resolve there. (4) List questions the set raises and none of them tests. (5) Build a bibliography with page-level anchors. Keep tables intact so sample sizes stay attached, and flag any figure that came from OCR.
The detail, if you want it
How each part of a PDF becomes a section
| From the PDF | Into | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Document structure in order | Method comparison | Headings, body and captions arrive as separate elements, which is what lets a methods section be identified and compared rather than guessed at. |
| Tables as tables | Method comparison | Tables come back as their own elements, so a sample size stays attached to the row and column that give it meaning. |
| Page numbers | Bibliography | A page-level anchor is what makes a citation checkable by someone else holding the same file. |
| Embedded images and figures | Themes | Figure captions frequently carry the tightest statement of a finding in the whole document. |
| Reading order | Scope | Elements come back in sequence, which is what lets an abstract and a limitations section be told apart. |
Everything Ancher keeps from a PDF
Document structure in order
Headings, body and captions arrive as separate elements, so the document's own outline survives ingest.
Page numbers
A page-level anchor is what makes a citation checkable by someone else holding the same file.
Tables as tables
Tables come back as their own elements rather than as flattened lines, so a figure stays attached to the row and column that give it meaning.
Embedded images and figures
Figure captions frequently carry the tightest statement of a finding in the whole document.
Reading order
Elements come back in sequence, which is what lets a section be reassembled rather than guessed at.
Word and PowerPoint too
The same path takes .docx and .pptx, so a deck and its write-up can sit in one collection.
The four steps
- Add the PDF. Upload the file. Ancher parses it into ordered elements rather than one flat string, keeps the page number on each, and pulls out the embedded images.
- Nothing gets flattened. Document structure in order, page numbers, tables as tables, embedded images and figures, reading order, word and powerpoint too stay separately addressable instead of collapsing into one block of text.
- Ask for a literature review. Ancher fills scope, themes, method comparison, gaps, bibliography using the mapping above, not a generic summary pass.
- Check it before you use it. Every specific keeps a link back to where it came from in the PDF, so a claim can be verified without reopening the source.
Where this goes wrong
- A review that agrees with itself everywhere is a review of your search query. If nothing in the set contradicts anything else, the set was assembled badly.
- Scanned papers need OCR, and OCR misreads digits more often than letters. Sample sizes and p-values are exactly the numbers to check against the page.
- Preprints and published versions differ, sometimes materially. The bibliography records which one you actually read.
Questions people ask
How many papers does this need?
Enough that the same question is approached differently — usually eight or more. Below that you are summarising a reading list rather than synthesising a literature, and the gaps section will be empty.
Why keep the tables as tables?
Because a sample size flattened into prose loses which study reported it. Most contradictions between papers turn out to be differences in sample or window, and that only shows up when the tables stay intact.
Can it tell me which paper is right?
No. It shows where the field agrees, where it splits, and how the methods differ at the split. Deciding which methodology to trust is the reviewer's judgement and it should stay there.
Bring your own PDFs
Everything you save lives in one workspace, so the literature review is built from your sources — not from a model's memory of the internet.
Open Ancher →Not a PDF? The same literature review also comes from web page.