Build an evidence dossier with page citations

When you write a complaint, a review or a summary, every statement should point to the place in the documents that supports it. The Evidence dossier on the Overview keeps those claims and their sources together in the dossier — next to the documents and tool results — so nothing gets lost between notes and PDFs.

1. Add a claim

Open the Overview (key 1) and scroll to the card Evidence dossier. Type the statement into Claim or finding — for example The notice period is three months — and press Add claim.

The claim appears below as Claim 1 with No evidence recorded yet. A dossier holds up to 200 claims. They are part of the dossier: autosave, the project file, share links and Google Drive keep them, and Ctrl+Z undoes every change.

2. Back it with evidence

Open Add evidence to claim 1 under the claim:

1. Document — any document of the dossier: a PDF, a scan, an office file or a pasted text.
2. Page (optional) — the page as numbered in the PDF viewer. For PDFs with a known page count Paperwell only accepts pages that exist.
3. Excerpt — copy the passage from the Read view or the PDF, or type it.

Press Add evidence. The entry shows the source as Contract.pdf, page 4 and the excerpt as a quotation. Add as many sources as you need — up to 100 per claim; two documents that say the same thing make a claim stronger.

Paperwell does not extract or check citations: the excerpt and page are exactly what you entered. Compare them with the source before you rely on them.

3. Go back to the source

Each evidence entry has buttons:

• Open document selects the document and switches to Read.
• Open PDF page 4 (only for PDFs with a page) opens the stored file in a new browser tab at that page, using the browser’s own PDF viewer. Allow pop-ups for the site if the browser blocks the tab. Whether the viewer jumps to the page depends on the browser; current Chrome, Edge and Firefox do.
• Remove evidence deletes only this entry.

If a document is removed from the dossier, its evidence stays with the claim: the recorded name and excerpt remain, marked This document is no longer in the dossier, and the buttons to open it disappear.

4. Put the evidence into the report

Open Report (key 0). The preview — and the printed PDF — has a section Evidence with one row per source: claim, source, page and excerpt. Claims without sources are listed with No evidence recorded yet., so gaps are easy to spot.

Under Exports:

• Evidence (CSV) — every claim with its documents, pages, excerpts and whether the document is still in the dossier; opens in any spreadsheet.
• Report (Markdown) — contains the claims as a numbered list with their quotations.

Tips

• Keep each claim to one statement. The fee rises to €49 from March is easier to prove than a paragraph.
• Use Checks or the readers first: a contract reading or a policy decoder often finds the passage you need to cite.
• Share links contain the claims but not the document files. The recipient needs the files in the dossier to open pages.

Next: report, exports and sharing.