Six tips for better reviews on BRIDGE

Small habits that make a review sharper and cheaper. Each tip comes from how the product behaves today.

1. Name the four parts in your request

Under the box where you write your topic, BRIDGE ticks four parts as your request names them: the method, the data or benchmark, the measure and the years. Each one that is missing gets a hint, and each one that is named becomes a criterion of its own or narrows the search. Compare:

Hallucination in medical question answering.

with

Retrieval-augmented generation methods that reduce hallucination in medical question answering, evaluated on MedQA or PubMedQA by accuracy, published since 2022.

The second request gives the search a method, a benchmark, a measure and a date range, and the comparison table can set papers side by side on the measure. You still approve the criteria before anything is searched.

2. Know what it covers

BRIDGE searches computer science and AI research literature. A request about another field is flagged on the criteria page, and you can edit it or approve only if you really want that search. When the request or its criteria are biomedical, PubMed is searched too.

3. Start Quick, then go deeper

The three depths have a stated purpose: Quick to try the scope of your question, Standard for a first review, Thorough to check before you write a proposal or a paper. Each shows its estimated time and cost before you send. When you are unsure that a question points the right way, a Quick review (20 papers read in full) costs the least. Its answer is preliminary, so do not cite it as final.

4. Upload the PDF when only an abstract was read

BRIDGE reads the full text of a paper where an open copy exists. For a paper it could read only by abstract, the paper page offers Upload PDF. If you can download the PDF through your library account, upload it, and the writing uses the full text. The file is used for that review only, and nobody else can see it.

A related trick: a finished review can be reopened at the paper list. That creates a new version that starts at the paper approval step with no new search. You can add a missing paper by its DOI or arXiv ID and move papers between the columns. Only papers nobody has read in full cost credits, and the estimate is shown before you approve.

5. Check the repo before you rent a GPU

Open Check a repo and paste an arXiv link, a paper ID or a GitHub link. The quick check is free, uses no AI and answers in a few seconds: does the repo declare its dependencies, have training and evaluation scripts, show how to run it, link to data or checkpoints, and still look maintained. It reads files and never runs the repo's code. The full audit goes further and compares the paper with the code, and it shows what it will hold in credits before it starts.

Treat a pass as "the setup looks complete". It does not promise that the code runs correctly.

6. Watch your credits

Every action that spends credits shows its estimate first. One credit is 0.01 USD of model spend, the balance is in the account menu, and credits come back 24 hours after use. The citation check and the quick repo check are the cheap ways to verify things before you spend on a full run.

If you have not yet seen the whole workflow, the guided tour walks it on a sample review and uses no credits. Start it from Take the guided tour in the sidebar, and read Run your first literature review on BRIDGE for the steps in order.