Methods Section Sanity Checker — Help

Three parts: how to start your 7-day Pro trial (it's separate from the subscription), a usage guide for running scans and reading the report, and troubleshooting for the most common issues. If none of these cover your case, jump to the bottom — the support template gets you a fix in under a day in most cases.

How do I start my 7-day Pro trial?

The trial is fully independent of the paid subscription. No card. No Stripe page. The trial lives entirely on your computer. One click inside the extension popup or welcome tab and the trial starts.

Install Methods Section Sanity Checker from the Chrome Web Store. The first install opens a welcome tab automatically.
On the welcome tab, pick your default guideline (CONSORT 2025, STROBE, or PRISMA 2020) and click the orange Start 7-day trial button. (You can also do this from the popup later — open the toolbar icon and click Start 7-day trial in the upgrade banner.)
That's it — full access unlocks immediately and the popup shows a countdown ("X days left in your trial") so you always know how much time is left.

What happens at the end of the trial?

The popup tells you the trial is over and shows a paywall view with Get monthly and Get annual buttons. If you want to keep curated example sentences and per-document Mark as addressed persistence, click one of the subscription buttons; that's the moment you go through Stripe. Detected items still show in a free preview after the trial ends.

Why two paths? The trial is fully local — no Stripe, no card, no email. The subscription is fully Stripe — that's where you enter payment details and get an emailed license key. They're decoupled on purpose: try the extension first, decide whether it's worth subscribing afterward, never the other way around.

I already subscribed (I have a license key from email). Where do I paste it?

Open the popup. Below the upgrade banner, click Already have a key? A small form expands. Paste your MSC-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX key and click Activate. The state flips to "PRO" immediately and the upgrade banner disappears.

Running a scan and reading the report

Two modes: direct scan (Google Docs — the extension reads your draft from the active tab) and paste-text fallback (Overleaf, Word, Pages, Scrivener, or anywhere else — paste the methods text into a textarea inside the side panel).

Direct scan from Google Docs

Open your draft in Google Docs (https://docs.google.com/document/...).
Click the toolbar icon to open the popup. Confirm the guideline dropdown matches your study type. Click Open scan panel. The side panel opens on the right.
In the side panel, on the Scan tab, click Scan methods section. The extension extracts the text under your Methods heading (or Materials and Methods, Methodology, Study design and participants, etc.) and runs every item in the chosen guideline.
Read the report. Edit your document. Click Re-scan to see the updated state.

Paste-text fallback

If you write in Overleaf, Word, Pages, Scrivener, a journal portal, or anywhere we don't have a direct content script:

Open the side panel as above.
Click the Paste text tab.
Paste your methods section into the textarea (just the methods, not the whole paper).
Click Scan pasted text.

Reading the three groups

Every item resolves to one of three states:

Detected

The engine found a strong, specific match for the item in your text. No further action required.

Partial

The topic is mentioned but the specifics are missing — or the match was downgraded by a false-positive guard (heading-only, citation context, blockquote). Add specifics; re-scan.

Not detected

No match found at all. Click the item to see the official guideline language and a curated example sentence; write that paragraph; re-scan.

Each red and amber item expands to show: the official guideline language verbatim, a plain-English explanation, an example sentence from a published paper, and a Mark as addressed button for the rare case the engine misses your phrasing. Marks persist per document URL and per guideline.

Copy-checklist-summary

The Copy summary button in the results header copies a plain-text checklist to your clipboard. Paste it into an email to your supervisor, a comment in your manuscript, or a TODO file. Format:

Methods Section Sanity Checker — STROBE
Scanned 2026-05-08T12:00:00.000Z

Detected (12):
  ✓ 6a  Eligibility, sources, follow-up
  ✓ 12a Confounding control
  …

Partially detected (3):
  ~ 9   Bias

Not detected (4):
  ✗ 10  Study size
     Official: Explain how the study size was arrived at.
     Example:  "Assuming an exposure prevalence of 30% …"
  …

Which guideline should I pick?

Your study is…	Use this guideline	Notes
A randomised controlled trial (parallel, factorial, cluster, crossover)	CONSORT 2025	If it's an RCT protocol (not a results paper), SPIRIT is more appropriate — scheduled for v1.1.
A cohort study (prospective or retrospective)	STROBE	Including registry-based and population-based cohorts.
A case-control or nested case-control study	STROBE	The matched-studies item (6b) covers matching specifics.
A cross-sectional study	STROBE	Including survey-based prevalence studies.
A systematic review or meta-analysis	PRISMA 2020	Network meta-analysis is also covered (PRISMA-NMA extension is on the v1.2 roadmap).
A diagnostic accuracy study	Use STROBE for now; STARD ships in v1.1.	STARD 2015 is the canonical guideline; subscribers get it free.
A qualitative study	Not in v1; SRQR / COREQ scheduled for v1.2+.	Email support@gradsummit.com if this is your blocker.

Tip: when in doubt, scan with the closest match and read the report critically. The example sentences make the gaps obvious even when the guideline isn't a perfect fit.

"We couldn't find a Methods heading in this document"

The extractor looks for headings like Methods, Materials and Methods, Methodology, Study design and participants, Patients and Methods, and a few other common variants. If your section is under a non-standard heading (Approach, What we did, Procedures, Workflow), the extractor won't recognise it.

Three fixes:

Rename the heading. Even temporarily — change ## Approach to ## Methods, scan, and rename it back. Reviewers expect Methods anyway.
Use the Paste tab. Copy your methods section text out of the document, paste it into the side panel's Paste text tab, and scan. Same engine, same report.
Style the heading consistently. The extractor recognises Markdown-style ## Methods, LaTeX \section{Methods}, and short title-case lines. If your "heading" is a long sentence ending in a period, it won't be picked up.

Fix. Easiest reliable workaround is the Paste tab. The direct-scan path is faster but the paste fallback always works on any text.

Overleaf, Word, Pages — use the Paste tab

v1 ships with one direct-scan integration: Google Docs. For drafts in Overleaf, Word, Pages, Scrivener, or anywhere else, the side panel's Paste tab is the universal workflow. The detection engine is the same — only the input path differs.

How to: in the side panel, click the Paste text tab, paste your methods section text into the textarea (just the methods, not the whole paper), and click Scan pasted text. The report renders identically to the direct-scan report.

Overleaf is scheduled to return as a first-class one-click integration in v1.1 — paid subscribers get it at no extra cost. The Paste-tab path stays the canonical fallback for every other editor.

Google Docs says "Couldn't read this Google Doc"

The extension calls Google's standard ?format=txt export endpoint to read your document — the same operation as File → Download → Plain Text. If you're not signed in to the Google account that owns the document (or if you have multiple Google accounts and the wrong one is the default), Google rejects the request.

Fix: open a new tab to accounts.google.com and confirm you're signed in to the account that owns the document. If you have multiple accounts, the URL of the document tab will include /u/0/, /u/1/, etc. — that number is the account index. Use the Switch account menu in Google Docs to make sure the right account is active. Refresh the tab and re-scan.

An item is flagged but I clearly addressed it

The keyword libraries are conservative on purpose: high precision (very few false positives), accepting some false negatives (the engine misses an unusual phrasing). Three options:

Click Mark as addressed on the item. It persists per document URL and per guideline; the engine treats it as detected from then on. Safe for one-off cases.
Rephrase to use a more standard term. The example sentence on the item shows the kind of phrasing the engine reliably matches. Reviewers also tend to recognise the standard phrasing faster.
Email us the phrasing. If you've found a reasonable phrasing the engine should obviously match, send it to support@gradsummit.com and we'll fold it into the next library update. The whole point of curated keyword libraries is that they get better with use.

Note: the engine does not assess quality of how an item is addressed — only whether the topic is structurally addressed. A bias paragraph is detected; whether it's a good bias paragraph is the reviewer's call (and the example sentence is a fair benchmark).

"License key not recognised"

Three usual causes:

Cause A: typo or trimmed key. License keys are 18 characters in the format MSC-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX using the alphabet A-Z 2-9 (no 0, 1, I, L, or O). If you typed the key by hand, double-check those substitutions. Easier: copy-paste from the activation email.

Cause B: wrong product key. Each GradSummit extension has its own prefix. CGF- is Citation Gap Finder, RQC- is Research Quote Capture, MSC- is Methods Section Sanity Checker. If your key starts with the wrong prefix, you have a key for a different product.

Cause C: license recently revoked. If you cancelled the subscription or refunded the charge, the key flips to inactive and the popup shows a different message ("That license is no longer active"). Email support@gradsummit.com if you believe this is in error.

Fix. Open your activation email, click the activation link (it pre-fills the key), then click Copy key on the activation page and paste into the popup.

Still stuck?

Email support@gradsummit.com and include all three of these:

Which guideline you were scanning with (CONSORT 2025, STROBE, PRISMA 2020).
Which platform (Google Docs direct scan, or paste-text fallback for Overleaf/Word/Pages/etc.).
The exact text of the error message in the side panel — or "no error, just doesn't work" if the panel doesn't change state at all.

With those three things, we can usually reply with a fix or workaround within 24 hours. We're a one-person operation; please don't include sensitive information (signed-in account screenshots, unpublished manuscripts).