How extraction works

Extraction turns every included paper into the same structured record: one form, filled once per paper, so the answers line up into an evidence table instead of a pile of notes. Four things make it run — a template, a distribution, a queue for each person, and a record per paper — and the rest of this section is a guide to each. This article is the map: what the pieces are, which words mean what on which page, and when a paper, a person, and the project each count as done.

The four pieces

The template is the form. The Owner or an Assistant builds it once — sections, fields, help text — and it moves through three states: Draft while it’s being designed, Published once extractors may open it, and Locked from the first submitted extraction onward, because answers only mean something against the fields they answered.

The distribution hands the included papers out. It can only run once screening is complete — every paper decided, every conflict resolved — and it assigns every included paper, split evenly across the extractors you pick. Whether each paper gets one person or two is decided by a single number, covered next.

The queues are where the work happens. Each reviewer has My extraction queue for the papers they extract and, on paired projects, My verification queue for the papers they check. A paper opens as a split workspace — PDF on the left, form on the right — with evidence linking and AI drafting built into the form.

The record is what a paper ends up with: the answers, the note and Needs attention flag, the evidence marks, and — where there was a verifier — what they agreed with and what they corrected. It’s what the evidence table reads and what the audit trail shows.

Solo or paired: the number that decides

The count of extractors you select at distribution shapes the whole phase, and the page says so in its Distribution logic note:

One extractor — each paper is assigned once. Submitting is finishing; there is no verifier. Every page drops what can’t happen: no Awaiting Validation counter, no Role filter, and the Validated panel on My extraction progress reads --. A project you run alone, or one where a single member does all the extracting, works this way.
Two or more — every paper carries two assignments, an extractor and a verifier, always two different people. The extractor fills the form; the verifier reads the submitted answers against the paper and corrects or confirms them. Roles alternate across the corpus so everyone does a balanced share of both, and with three or more people the pairing rotates.

What a paper goes through

The same paper wears different labels depending on who is looking:

In the extractor’s queue it’s Pending until opened, In Progress after a Save Draft, and Completed after Submit. A submitted paper can still be reopened — the button reads Update Submission — until a verifier validates it.
In the verifier’s queue it sits locked as Awaiting extraction until the extractor submits, then offers Verify, and shows Validated once the verifier confirms.
On the monitor, which counts papers rather than people, it’s Pending, In Progress, Awaiting Validation (extracted, not yet verified), or Completed (everyone assigned to it is done).

What counts as done follows from the roles: on a solo project a paper is done when it’s submitted; on a paired project, when it’s validated. Validation freezes the record — the form opens read-only, the paperclips disappear, and the evidence set stays exactly as it stood when the answers were agreed.

The project is done when every assignment is completed. At that moment the Owner gets an Extraction complete notification pointing at the evidence table — the signal that the extraction phase has ended and the Results synthesis can be drafted.

Who does what

The three project roles split the work cleanly. The Owner and Assistants build and publish the template, run the distribution and any later reassignment, and watch the whole phase through the monitor and overview. Reviewers work from their queues and the form, and follow their own numbers on My extraction progress; the management pages refuse them. Extracting itself belongs to whoever holds the assignments — Owners and Assistants included, if they put themselves in the roster. See Roles and permissions for the full matrix.

Where the answers end up

The evidence table holds one row per paper and always takes the verified version of the answers where one exists, the submitted version otherwise — so corrections are never lost and nothing is re-entered. View on a monitor card opens the audit trail for a paper: who extracted, who verified, and every field shown as agreed or as a before → after correction. The note, flag, and evidence marks stay on the record for anyone who later asks where a number came from.

There is one way back. Delete — the extractor’s own button on the form, or Delete extraction data on the monitor — discards the answers, evidence, and note, and resets the assignment to Pending; on a paired paper the verifier’s side resets with it. It’s the redo-from-scratch path, and it is also the only way to unlock a template once real extraction has started.