Frequently Asked Questions

What is Refine?

Refine deeply examines your draft using the leading AI models. It devotes hours of compute to examining every detail. By parallelizing the work, it takes about 30 minutes to return the sort of comments an excellent research assistant would produce by studying your work for days.

How is Refine different from typical writing tools?

Refine's most valuable feedback is about the substance of your paper. It checks your logic, arguments, and internal references by following them in detail.

Refine is especially good for manuscripts that involve mathematical or logical reasoning, as found in the natural and social sciences, engineering, mathematics, statistics, etc.

Top researchers in these fields typically report that Refine identifies substantive errors (e.g., errors of notation, inconsistencies across tables, incomplete justifications in proofs, etc.) that they had missed.

How is Refine different from just putting my work into ChatGPT, Claude, or a similar tool?

The best way to answer this question is to try Refine, then try another tool (with whatever prompts you'd like!) and compare the output.

Our experience is that even with very good prompts, leading chatbots will not give you anywhere near the depth, quality, and consistency of Refine's comments. The reason is that, behind the scenes, Refine performs many hours of computation (in parallel) to produce and distill feedback that is worth your attention.

If your experience is different, we'd love to talk to you, and we'll credit back any usage of Refine as a thank you.

How do I use it?

In Preview mode, we walk you through every step. Using the Refine Editor interface is also simple:

1. Paste or upload your text into our interface (LaTeX, Markdown, plain text, or a PDF) and click Process.
2. Let Refine cook! Many parallel AI workers will analyze your draft for 20-40 minutes.
3. Receive the output: The feedback panel contains substantive comments that our users typically find most valuable.

How long will it take?

Refine typically processes your document in about 20-40 minutes, depending on its length and complexity. It uses large amounts of compute, reasoning for many hours, but doing so efficiently by parallelizing the work. While we're working hard to make this even faster, we prioritize quality over speed.

Who should use Refine?

Refine is built for scholars and other writers who demand excellence. Whether you're submitting to top journals, applying for grants, completing assignments for courses, or writing an application, Refine gives your ideas the polish, both on substance and style, previously available only by hiring a seasoned professional (or a few of them).

What don't you do?

Refine focuses specifically on enhancing your writing through comprehensive comments. We don't currently handle citation formatting, bibliography management, fact-checking, or content development.