The lesson of PRISMA: traceability, applied to your documentation

When researchers synthesize hundreds of studies to draw a conclusion, they follow a strict standard so that no one can accuse them of cherry-picking their sources. That standard has a lot to teach anyone who wants to trust an AI assistant.

What the research says

PRISMA 2020 (Page et al., 2021) is the reference for reporting a systematic review. Its principle comes down to one word: traceability. You must declare how you searched, what you included, what you excluded and why — down to a flow diagram that shows the fate of each source. The goal: that a third party can reproduce everything and verify. Nothing enters the conclusion without declared provenance; nothing is discarded in silence.

It's not a piece of software, it's a discipline — but it's exactly the discipline that most « chatbots on your documents » lack: they answer, without you knowing where the answer comes from or what was ignored along the way.

What we do at Manent

We don't claim to be « PRISMA certified » — that would be a category error. But we built the engine on the same spirit of traceability, applied to your documentation:

• Every file has a declared fate. On arrival, an inventory states what is processable, empty, duplicated, protected — and what is ignored is recorded, never skipped in silence. That's your own flow diagram.
• Reproducible. Fingerprints, versions, before/after audit: re-depositing the same folder gives back the same result. You can verify.
• Every answer traces back to its source. Just as a scientific claim refers to its study, every answer refers to the file, the section, the page.
• Reversible. Every decision (reference version, published card, retag) has an undo. Nothing is set in stone without a net.

References

1. Page, M. J. et al. (2021). The PRISMA 2020 statement: an updated guideline for reporting systematic reviews. BMJ, 372:n71.