Guides
Operational guidance for using MARCUS well once the basics are already familiar.
These guides are for the stage after basic onboarding. You already know how to create a project, upload sources, and ask a question. Now the focus shifts to using MARCUS consistently, safely, and at a level that supports real clinical, educational, and operational work.
These guides remain inside the current institutional non-PHI boundary. For the complete workflow and safety rules, start with the Clinician Handbook.
What These Guides Are For
Use the Guides section when your question sounds like one of these:
- How should I organize projects so answers stay reliable over time?
- How do I tell whether a source is strong enough to lean on?
- What is the best way to inspect the library beyond the conversation surface?
- Why are the answers getting weaker even though the system is still "working"?
- How should I share a useful answer without stripping away the evidence trail?
Guide Library
Managing Projects
Keep project boundaries clean, reduce drift, and preserve source-review quality.
Using the Library
Search, filter, compare, and inspect indexed evidence across the full library.
Reading Source Briefings
Interpret summaries, key points, concepts, source evidence labels, and indexing signals.
Reading Source Evidence
Check provenance, publication dates, versions, and supporting passages.
Using Knowledge Surfaces
Work with graphs, knowledge pages, theme analysis, and evidence matrices.
Sharing Answers
Share useful output without losing the context that makes it trustworthy.
Analytics And Costs
Read adoption and spend patterns at the organization or program level.
Troubleshooting Answers
Fix weak citations, low coverage, mixed projects, and source-quality problems.
Which Guides Matter Most For Different Roles
| Role | Start here | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Resident or clinician | /docs/guides/reading-briefings and /docs/guides/troubleshooting-answers | These two pages help you tell whether an answer is usable before you rely on it. |
| Project owner or service lead | /docs/guides/managing-projects and /docs/guides/authority-levels | Project structure and careful interpretation of source authority are major drivers of review quality. |
| Educator, librarian, or knowledge curator | /docs/guides/using-library and /docs/guides/using-knowledge-surfaces | These explain how to inspect the library itself rather than only the final conversation output. |
| Admin or technical reviewer | /docs/guides/analytics-costs and /docs/guides/sharing-answers | These show how usage, governance, and communication fit around the product. |
Habits That Usually Improve MARCUS Results
- Keep each project narrow enough that the right documents genuinely belong together.
- Review at least one source briefing after important uploads.
- Prefer a small, trusted library over a large, noisy one.
- Ask questions that request a threshold, criterion, step, or comparison.
- Open the citations before using the answer in a consequential workflow.
- When answers get weaker, inspect the library before blaming the model.
If You Only Have Time For Three Guides
If you want the shortest path to better everyday use, read these first:
Together, those three pages explain how to set up a healthy library, recognize when the evidence looks weak, and recover when the output quality slips.