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.
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 corpus beyond the chat 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 retrieval quality.
Using the Library
Search, filter, compare, and inspect indexed evidence across the full corpus.
Reading Source Briefings
Interpret summaries, key points, concepts, authority badges, and indexing signals.
Understanding Authority Levels
Judge how much weight a document should probably carry in practice.
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 source weighting are the two biggest drivers of answer quality. |
| Educator, librarian, or knowledge curator | /docs/guides/using-library and /docs/guides/using-knowledge-surfaces | These explain how to inspect the corpus itself rather than only the final chat 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 corpus 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 corpus 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 corpus, recognize when the evidence looks weak, and recover when the output quality slips.