Guide · browser companion

Capture full text from the browser

The browser companion helps you send articles, PDFs, supplements, and citation metadata from pages you can legally access into the right Axelium review. It is most useful for institutional subscriptions, publisher pages, and studies that need manual confirmation.

When to use it

An automatic full-text search could not retrieve a paper.
You are logged in through an institution and can view the article in your browser.
A supplement or data appendix is available on a publisher page.
You want to capture metadata from a publisher page before uploading the PDF.

Basic workflow

Install the companion and connect it from your Axelium account.
Open the article, PDF, or supplement in your browser.
Choose the target review and study from the companion panel.
Review the detected title, DOI, PMID, publisher, and file type.
Send the capture to Axelium and wait for the document status to become Parsed.

WARN · Respect access rights

Only capture documents you are allowed to access and use for the review. The companion is a workflow aid, not a way to bypass publisher terms, institutional policy, or copyright restrictions.

Saving the page you are on

On a well-known publisher site a capture button appears on the article itself. On any other journal page — a smaller publisher, or an article you reached through your library’s sign-in — click the companion icon and choose Save this page at the top of Reviews. The companion works out which of your reviews is waiting for that paper and saves it there, or tells you why it could not: the page is not a paper one of your reviews is waiting for, it has no PDF the companion could find, or it did not give access.

While you are signed in, the companion checks the article you open on a well-known publisher site against your reviews, so the button can appear on any paper they still need — including reviews whose list you have not opened in the companion.

Fetching the papers a review still needs

Once a review has been through full-text search, some papers are usually still missing — typically the ones behind a subscription your institution holds but an automatic search cannot use. Rather than opening each one by hand, you can ask the companion to work through what is left.

Open the companion and choose Assistant. It opens in a side panel that stays put while you keep working.
Pick the review, then choose Start. The very first time, your browser asks once for permission to read journal pages; it words that request broadly, but the companion only reads a page when one of your papers needs it.
You are then shown exactly what will happen and asked to allow it for that review. Any other review asks again.
The companion works through the remaining papers a few at a time, never more than one per journal. Every paper already in your own reference library is saved from there first, before any journal page is opened; then it opens the journal pages you already have access to.
Choose Stop at any point; anything not yet fetched is simply left for next time.

Once a review is allowed, the run continues with the side panel closed, so you can get on with something else. The toolbar icon shows how many papers are still to go, and nothing is fetched twice.

Free copies Axelium could not download

Some papers are free to read, but the website holding them does not allow automatic downloads. When Axelium finds such a copy, the companion opens that copy first, then the paper’s DOI link. This also covers papers that have a PubMed ID but no DOI.

If the website asks for a person (a check that you are not a robot, or a publisher that does not allow automatic downloads from PubMed Central), the companion stops there for that paper. The Full text page lists it with a link to open; once it is open in your browser, save it with the companion as usual, or upload the PDF.

Starting on its own

You do not have to come back to the panel each time. Once a review is allowed, the companion notices when it has new papers to fetch and starts by itself, as long as Chrome is open and the companion is signed in: usually within a couple of minutes of a full-text run finishing, and within about twenty minutes when papers arrive some other way, such as a living search adding studies.

You can also allow a review from the Full text page in Axelium itself. When full text finishes with papers still missing, the page offers to let the companion fetch them; agree there and the companion picks the review up without you opening it. Papers Axelium hasn’t tried to download yet are not offered: the page asks you to choose Download PDFs for those first, since that fetches most open-access papers within seconds, and the companion then picks up whatever it couldn’t reach. A run that stopped because a journal asked it to waits a few hours before starting that review again; one that reached its limit for a sitting takes a short breather and carries on.

On a shared review, anyone who can add its full texts can allow this for their own companion — useful when a colleague’s library has access yours does not. Each person’s companion uses that person’s own access and keeps its own pace with each journal. Someone who can only view the review cannot allow it.

Working off campus through your library’s sign-in is supported: a journal reached that way is treated as the journal itself, and the PDF is fetched through the same sign-in.

You can withdraw that permission at any time — from the companion, or from Settings → Connected apps in Axelium, which works even if the device it is running on is switched off.

Most papers are resolved by the companion’s own rules. Where those rules cannot work out where a PDF is, it can ask an AI assistant to read that one journal page and say where to look. Only a summary of the page is shared — its links and visible text, with email addresses, access keys and long reference numbers stripped out first — and the assistant is only ever asked where the PDF is. It cannot type, sign in, or buy anything. This happens for a handful of papers per run at most, never twice for the same paper, and never on a journal that has asked you to prove you are human.

WARN · It stops when a publisher asks it to

Nothing is fetched that you could not open yourself, and never more than three papers a minute from any one journal. If a publisher signals that it would rather you slowed down or signed in again, the run stops and tells you, rather than pressing on. Papers you are not entitled to are recorded as unavailable and skipped.

Seeing what it fetched, and undoing it

Anything the companion fetches for you is recorded as having arrived automatically rather than by your own hand. On the Full text page of a review it has worked on, a line at the top says how many papers it has collected and whether any journal is currently paused; from there, See what it fetched opens the full list.

Each entry shows the paper, the journal site it came from, when it arrived, whose companion fetched it, and whether anything in your review has been built on it yet. You can remove any of them — one at a time or several at once.

WARN · Removing a paper can take more with it

Once a paper has been read and used, other things point at it: the text pulled out of it, the tables found in it, and the record of which page each extracted value came from. Removing the paper removes those too. The extracted values themselves stay in your review, but they will no longer link back to the page they came from, and fetching the paper again does not restore that link. You are told exactly what is affected before anything is removed.

Removing a paper is treated as a decision, not a mistake: the companion will not go and fetch it again on its next run. If you do want it back, upload it yourself from the Full text page.

Paused journals are listed with the reason and when they resume. Nothing is wrong on your side when this happens — the companion waits and picks them up again by itself.

Authorization and revocation

The companion connects to your Axelium account with an app-specific authorization. Revoke it from Settings → Connected apps if a device is lost, if you leave a team, or when you no longer need the extension. After revocation, reconnect from the app before sending more captures.

Troubleshooting

If the target study is not listed, confirm you are in the correct review workspace.
If a PDF is blocked, download it through your normal institutional access and use manual upload.
If the Full text page says a paper is free to read but the website needs you to open it, use its link, then save the paper with the companion or upload the PDF.
If a supplement is not detected, save the file locally and upload it to the study from the Full text page.
If a capture lands on the wrong study, remove it before extraction and upload it again to the correct record.
If a run finishes immediately with nothing fetched, the review may have no remaining papers, or none of the journals involved have been allowed yet in companion settings.
If Save this page says the page did not give access, sign in through your library, open the article again, and save it once more.

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