A tour of the ScholarThread web workspace

Every research tool has to answer the same layout question: where does everything live, and how much of the screen does each thing get? Most either cram the whole app onto one scrolling page, or throw up a handful of fixed sidebars that all fight for space. ScholarThread splits the screen into three panes that each do exactly one job — and that you can resize, collapse, or reorganize however the day's work calls for.

Three panes, three jobs

Open Library or Notes and you'll see the same shape, just filled with different things:

• Sources, on the left — the tree of what you're browsing. In Library it's called Sources: All papers, your collections, and Trash (plus a Needs review queue whenever there are papers waiting on you). In Notes the same pane is called Folders: All notes, Unfiled, your own folders, a Views group with Concepts, Highlights and Templates, and Trash.
• The list, in the middle — the papers or notes that match whatever's selected on the left. Click a collection, see its papers; click a folder, see its notes.
• The workspace, on the right — a tabbed panel where the things you actually open live: a paper's detail view, a note editor, a PDF or EPUB reader, the knowledge graph, a chat.

Clicking something in the list doesn't navigate you away from it — it opens a tab in the workspace, next to whatever else you already had open. Read a paper, open a note that cites it, flip back to the paper — all as tabs in one panel, so you never lose your place in the list you were browsing to get there.

The workspace is the main event, not an afterthought

The workspace panel is where the actual reading and writing happens, so it shouldn't be squeezed into a strip down the side. Drag the dividers between the panes and the workspace takes whatever room the other two give up, so it can grow to be the largest pane on screen, not just a fixed sliver. Double-click a divider to snap that pane back to its default width. The widths you set are remembered between visits.

Sources and the list can each collapse to a thin bar with one click on the chevron in their header, and a collapse you make yourself stays put. The workspace also makes room on its own, in two steps:

• Opening a paper or note collapses the navigation rail, so the content gets the width. The Sources and list columns stay where they are, so you can keep selecting and dragging.
• A reader or the knowledge graph is different: while one of those is the active tab, Sources and the list step aside too, and they come back when you switch to another tab or close the last one. Landing on Library or Notes from the main navigation likewise reopens any column that was only auto-collapsed.

Selecting more than one thing at a time

Click a paper or a note to select and open it, same as always. But if you're cleaning up a big batch — adding a dozen papers to a collection, or clearing out a pile of stray notes — you don't have to do it one at a time:

• Shift-click selects a range, from the last item you clicked to the one you just shift-clicked.
• Cmd/Ctrl-click toggles individual rows in and out of the selection without opening them.
• Drag any row in the selection, and the whole selection moves together — onto a collection to add them all to it at once (in Library a paper can sit in more than one collection), or onto Trash to clear them out in one motion. Drag a row that isn't part of your current selection, and only that one row moves, so a stray drag never sweeps up items you didn't mean to touch.

For a handful of items this is barely different from doing it one at a time. For fifty, it's the difference between a five-second job and a five-minute one — and you'll see a quick status message confirming what happened ("Added 12 papers to…", "Moved 5 notes to…"), so a big batch never looks like it silently did nothing.

Trash, all the way down

Individual papers and notes have always been able to go to Trash. Now the containers can too: drag a whole collection onto Trash, and every paper inside it — including any nested collections — moves to Trash together, with the collections themselves removed from your sidebar. Drag a folder in Notes onto Trash and you get the same choice you'd get from that folder's own menu: Move the notes to Unfiled or Move the notes to Trash. The folder itself is deleted either way, and an empty folder just asks for a plain confirmation. In both places ScholarThread tells you how much is about to move before anything happens ("12 papers will move to Trash…"), so clearing out an old project takes one drag instead of clicking into every paper and note it contains.

Finding things without leaving what you're doing

Search is its own page in the sidebar, with the same two-tab model we've written about before: Your library for everything you already have, OpenAlex for discovering new work in the open literature. (See One search box for your library and the open web for the full story on why it's just those two.) Its results list takes the place of the Sources column, and clicking a result opens it in the workspace while the list stays put. Whichever tab you're in, your open tabs stay exactly where they were — search is one more source feeding tabs into the same panel, not a separate mode that throws away your open work.

Doing this in ScholarThread

Open Library or Notes and the three panes are already there — drag the dividers to resize, and collapse Sources or the list with the chevron in their header when you want more room. Shift-click or Cmd/Ctrl-click to select more than one paper or note, then drag the selection onto a collection, a folder, or Trash. And when a whole project is done, drag its collection or folder straight to Trash instead of clearing it out one item at a time.

None of this is a new mode to learn — it's the same click-and-drag you already know, just no longer limited to one thing at a time.