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How to use Claude for research work

Claude can read your papers, compare them and search the web, but only if you feed it material the right way and check what it says. This guide walks through a research workflow, from the first PDF to organized findings.

Updated 30 October 2026

These steps were checked against Anthropic's help pages on 30 October 2026. Claude's menus change often, so labels may differ slightly as of your visit.

Step 1: Give Claude the papers

For one paper or a handful you want to discuss now, a regular chat is enough.

1. Click + in the lower left of the chat box.
2. Choose Add files or photos and pick your PDFs, or drag them into the chat.
3. Ask your first question once the files show as attached.

Limits as of October 2026: up to 20 files per chat, 500MB per file, and PDFs of up to 1,000 pages. How Claude reads a PDF depends on its length. Up to 100 pages, it takes in the text and the visual parts: figures, charts and graphics. From 101 to 1,000 pages it reads only the text, so a long thesis or report loses its plots. If the figures matter, split the PDF and upload the chapters you need.

Other formats work too, including DOCX, TXT, HTML, EPUB, CSV and JSON, but for those Claude extracts the text only and can't interpret images embedded in them.

Step 2: Keep a literature set in a project

If you'll keep working with the same papers for weeks, put them in a project instead of re-uploading them to every chat. Add them to the project's Files section and every conversation in that project can use them. Project files have a lower size cap, 30MB each, and Claude reads them as extracted text, except PDFs, which keep their visual content.

On paid plans (Pro, Max, Team and Enterprise), a project whose knowledge grows close to Claude's context limit switches to retrieval automatically: Claude searches the project files and pulls only the relevant passages instead of loading everything at once. Anthropic says this can raise a project's capacity up to ten times. You can't switch it on yourself; it depends on the project's size. Clear file names help, so name papers like 2024-Smith-sleep-memory.pdf rather than download(3).pdf. For more on setting projects up, see how to set up Claude Projects.

Step 3: Ask questions that are easy to check

Vague prompts like "summarize this" produce vague answers. Research questions work better when they're narrow and point somewhere you can verify.

• Name the place. "What sample size and method does the paper describe on pages 4–6?" When you refer to pages, use the page numbers your PDF viewer shows, not the numbers printed on the paper; Anthropic recommends this.
• Ask for where it found it. "Quote the sentence that supports this, and say which file and section it's in." A quoted line is quick to look up.
• Compare across papers. "Make a table of these four papers: question, method, sample, main finding, stated limitations."
• Hunt for disagreement. "Where do these papers contradict each other, and what might explain it?"

Treat Claude's reading as a fast first pass. Open the paper and confirm any number, quote or claim before it goes into your own writing.

Step 4: Use Research for wide searches

When the question goes beyond the files you have, such as finding recent work on a topic or comparing what several groups have reported, use Research.

1. Make sure web search is on (Team and Enterprise members need an Owner to allow it under Organization settings > Capabilities).
2. Click + in the chat box and choose Research. A blue indicator appears at the bottom of the chat.
3. Ask a specific question, ideally with the scope you care about: field, time period and type of source.

Research usually makes five or more searches and tool calls and typically takes about one to three minutes. Anthropic suggests combining it with extended thinking for larger jobs such as analyzing several scientific papers, which gives a more carefully planned and longer report. For a single fact, plain web search is quicker. The full Claude Research guide covers the mode itself in more detail.

Step 5: Check the citations

Anthropic says web search answers include citations so you can verify them, and Research is designed to pull together several sources with citations. A citation tells you where to look; it doesn't prove the claim. For each source you plan to use, open the link, find the passage, and confirm it says what Claude reported. Then cite the original paper in your own work, not Claude's summary.

Good to know

• Plans: Research is on Pro, Max, Team and Enterprise, in Claude on the web, the desktop app and mobile. Free accounts can use web search, with usage limits that reset every five hours.
• Model: Research runs on Claude Opus 5.5, with Claude Opus 4.8 as a fallback, whatever model you picked for the chat.
• Usage: Research and fetching long articles use your limits faster than ordinary messages.
• Connectors: Research can use connectors turned on for the chat, such as Google Docs, without asking each time. On mobile it searches only the web.

If it doesn't work

• The upload fails: the PDF is over 1,000 pages or the file over the size cap. Split it into parts.
• Claude ignores a figure: the PDF is longer than 100 pages, so only its text was read. Upload the relevant pages as a shorter PDF.
• No Research option, or Claude doesn't research: check that you're on a paid plan and that web search is on, or ask Claude directly to use the research tool. On Team and Enterprise, an admin may have turned off the models Research needs.
• Answers about the wrong pages: use the viewer's page numbers, not the printed ones.

Keep your findings organized

A research chat ends with scattered findings, open questions and things to read next. With the Workbranch connector for Claude, you can say "save this to Workbranch" and Claude files the chat's tasks, decisions, open questions and ideas into a project, by topic, so the next reading session starts from what's still open. You can try it with the 3-day free trial at app.workbranch.ai.

Sources

• Upload files to Claude (Claude Help Center, checked 30 October 2026)
• Retrieval augmented generation (RAG) for projects (Claude Help Center, checked 30 October 2026)
• Use Research on Claude (Claude Help Center, checked 30 October 2026)
• When should I use web search, extended thinking and Research? (Claude Help Center, checked 30 October 2026)
• Enabling and using web search (Claude Help Center, checked 30 October 2026)

Frequently asked questions