Lab Chat

Lab Chat is AcaTrove's Multi-Doc Chat feature scoped to your lab's document library. It lets you ask questions across all papers, protocols, and reports associated with your lab and receive AI-generated answers backed by citations from those documents.

How Lab Chat Works

Lab Chat uses the same Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system that powers Multi-Doc Chat in projects. When you ask a question:

1. AcaTrove's semantic search identifies the most relevant passages across all documents linked to your lab.
2. The AI retrieves those passages and uses them as context to generate a response.
3. The response includes inline citations that reference the specific documents and passages used.

The key difference between Lab Chat and project-based Multi-Doc Chat is scope. Lab Chat searches across your entire lab's document collection, which typically spans multiple projects, years of research, and contributions from many lab members. This makes it particularly useful for institutional knowledge retrieval.

Starting a Lab Chat Session

1. Open your lab.
2. Open the Research AI Panel from the sidebar.
3. Select Multi-Doc Chat from the panel's feature menu.
4. The chat automatically scopes to the current lab's documents. A message confirms the scope and the number of documents available.
5. Type your question and press Send.

Lab Chat interface showing scoped document collection

Use Cases

Lab Chat is particularly valuable for questions that span your lab's collective body of work:

• Onboarding new members -- "What protocols has this lab used for Western blotting?" or "What are the key findings from our last three publications?"
• Literature context -- "Which of our papers discusses the role of CRISPR in gene therapy?"
• Methodology questions -- "What sample sizes have we used in our behavioral studies, and what was the rationale?"
• Cross-project connections -- "Are there any findings from the 2024 cohort study that contradict our 2025 pilot results?"
• Quick fact retrieval -- "What concentration of buffer did we use in the Smith et al. protocol?"

Understanding Citations

Every Lab Chat response includes inline citations. Each citation links to:

• The source document -- The paper, protocol, or report the information came from.
• The specific passage -- The exact text the AI used to generate that part of the response.
• A link to open the document in Paper Chat for deeper exploration.

Citations allow you to verify that the AI's response accurately reflects your lab's documented work. This is especially important when using Lab Chat to inform new experiments or publications.

Lab Chat response with inline citations linking to source documents

Improving Lab Chat Quality

The quality of Lab Chat responses depends directly on the documents in your lab's collection:

• Upload full-text documents -- Abstracts provide limited context. Full-text uploads give the AI much more to work with.
• Keep documents organized -- Remove outdated or irrelevant documents that may introduce noise into search results.
• Link relevant papers -- Ensure that key publications, protocols, and datasets from your lab's history are linked to the lab, not just to individual projects.
• Upload protocols and SOPs -- Lab-specific documents like protocols are often the most useful sources for Lab Chat because they contain practical, actionable information that published papers may not.

Lab Chat vs. Project Multi-Doc Chat

| Feature | Lab Chat | Project Multi-Doc Chat | |---------|----------|----------------------| | Scope | All lab documents | Documents in one project | | Best for | Lab-wide knowledge, onboarding, cross-project questions | Project-specific research questions | | Document count | Typically larger | Typically smaller, more focused |

Both features use the same underlying RAG technology. Choose the scope that best matches your question.

Tips

• Use Lab Chat to onboard new lab members. Encourage them to ask Lab Chat questions about protocols and past work before asking senior members.
• Periodically review which documents are linked to your lab. A well-curated document collection produces better Lab Chat results than a large, unfocused one.
• Combine Lab Chat with Paper Chat. Use Lab Chat to find the right document, then open it in Paper Chat for a deep-dive conversation with that specific paper.