A tool to write guides, and a library to share them
The Guide Guide is for researchers who need to learn a complex topic quickly: a neighbouring technique, a theory from another group, a method they are about to use for the first time. It starts with polymer science and will grow into neighbouring fields.
The two parts
The Guide Guide is a method with copy-and-paste prompts. You enter your topic, your reader, the reading time and the features you want. It gives you a chain of prompts: careful notes on your sources, an outline you approve, one chapter at a time, each one checked, and an independent audit at the end.
The library is where finished guides are published. It grows out of the tool: when your guide is done, you can add it here. Readers can then do what an AI cannot: follow the guide and report whether it worked.
Publishing a guide
- No account. You upload one HTML file and fill in a title, a summary and a topic.
- Automatic checks against spam. An invisible human check, a limit of one submission every five minutes from the same connection, and a hidden field that only bots fill in.
- An AI screen. A small, inexpensive model reads the guide first. If it is unsure, a stronger model gives a second opinion. The screen answers with one of three verdicts: publish, reject, or send to a person.
- A private edit link. You get it once, when you submit. It lets you edit or delete your guide later, or add a DOI.
What the AI screen can and cannot do
It can tell a real guide from spam, advertising or abuse. It cannot tell whether the science is right. That is why every guide it publishes carries the Unreviewed label until a person has verified it.
The screen treats a submission strictly as material to read, never as instructions. Text in a guide that tries to talk to the screen sends the guide to a person.
The labels
What a guide should contain
- Prerequisites: what the reader needs to know first.
- Core concepts: simple ideas before the ideas built on them.
- Worked examples: real numbers from the sources, step by step.
- Common pitfalls: where newcomers go wrong.
- Key papers: what to read next, and why.
References must be real. AI assistants invent citations that look right. Open every reference you cite before you publish. The Guide Guide method builds this in: every claim points to a page and the exact words that support it.
Figures must be yours to share. Redraw figures yourself, or use figures from open-access sources with their licence and credit. Do not copy figures from paywalled papers.
The file must stand alone. For the safety of readers, a guide in the library runs in a sealed frame and cannot load anything from the internet. Everything it needs has to be inside the one HTML file.
Credit without an account
You can publish anonymously, or add your name and your ORCID iD so the guide is tied to you.
To make a guide citable, deposit the HTML file in a research repository that issues DOIs, such as Zenodo. Create an upload there, attach the file, publish it, and copy the DOI it gives you. Then open your private edit link here and paste the DOI in. It appears on the guide's page as a link.
Guides are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence: anyone may reuse them, as long as they credit the author.
If something is wrong
Every guide has a Report this guide button. Reports go to a person, not to the AI screen. See terms, reports and takedown for what happens next.
Who runs this
The Guide Guide is a non-profit project by Michael Lusk, researcher at the Center for Polymer and Materials Technologies (CPMT), Ghent University. It has no adverts, no accounts and no tracking. Hosting costs are low; the AI screen is the main expense and has a fixed monthly limit. If the site saved you time, you can buy me a coffee.