Concept
Shared facts: short facts reused for the same paper
How a checked sample size or year from the same paper can fill your matrix cell at 0 credits, but only after its passage is found again in your own PDF.
Many researchers read the same well-known papers. When one of them has already checked a simple fact about a paper, such as how many people took part, there is no reason for everyone else to pay the AI to find it again. CurTask calls these shared facts.
Shared facts are the only thing in CurTask that ever passes between accounts, and they are kept deliberately small.
What can be shared
Only short, factual values about a paper that has a DOI:
- a number or a single choice, never sentences;
- answered in a matrix column made from a template and left exactly as the template asks. Today that means the Sample size and Data collection year templates;
- and only after a researcher has accepted the AI's value unchanged, and the value appears word for word in the quote it came from.
If two researchers accept different values for the same fact, that fact stops being shared, so no one receives a disputed value.
What is never shared
Your summaries, findings, limitations, quotes, codes, memos, notes and writing never leave your account. Neither does anything you typed or edited yourself. Nothing that says who you are, which project you work in or which papers you own is kept with a shared fact.
It must be found again in your own PDF
Two people can have different versions of the same paper (a preprint and the published article), so page numbers can differ. Before a shared fact fills your cell, CurTask looks for the same passage in your own copy of the paper. Only if the passage is there does the cell get the value, with your page and your quote. If it isn't found, the shared fact is not used and the AI reads your paper as usual.
This keeps the rule that every AI value in CurTask points to a real passage on the right page of your PDF. See How CurTask's AI finds evidence.
What you see
A cell filled from a shared fact looks like any other AI cell: it is Suggested, with its page and quote, until you accept it. You can open it in the reader, edit it or regenerate it like any other value. The estimate before a fill counts these cells as Reused from baggage at 0 credits, so you see the saving before anything runs.
How it fits with Baggage
Baggage is your own earlier work on a paper, reused when it joins another of your projects. Shared facts are the same idea across accounts, limited to a few checked facts. Both cost 0 credits. Read more about what stays private in Private by default.