Gemini Notebook as a
research collaborator
Grounded AI for literature reviews and meeting notes. It only ever answers from the sources you give it.
Same bottleneck, different fields
Immunology, cancer biology, infectious disease. Different questions, same two problems.
Too much to read
More papers than any of us has time to read, in every subfield.
Reference managers store. They don't think.
Zotero, Mendeley and EndNote organise your library. They don't help you interrogate it.
Meeting notes go missing
Supervision and collaboration meetings fade into memory, or into scattered voice memos.
One tool, two gaps
Gemini Notebook has become how I close both. It's not a replacement for reading. It's a way to question a curated set of sources.
What it is
A Google tool, built on Gemini, that answers only from the sources you upload into a notebook. Ask questions in plain language and it retrieves the relevant passages before answering (retrieval-augmented generation, or RAG).
Sources
PDFs · audio · video · docs
Upload what you trust. Caps scale with plan.
Gemini Notebook
Retrieves the relevant passages
Not the open internet. Not its training data.
Answer
With inline citations
Every claim traceable back to a source.
Recently renamed. Google renamed NotebookLM to Gemini Notebook on 16 July 2026. Same product, same notebooks, same links. notebooklm.google.com still works.
Plans
Source caps per notebook: 50 (free) · 100 (Plus) · 300 (Pro) · 600 (Ultra). Screenshot taken 28/07/2026.
Does it hallucinate?
Why the risk drops
Every claim comes with an inline citation to the exact passage and source it used.
It's restricted to your uploaded sources rather than the open web or training data, so hallucination risk drops sharply versus a general chatbot.
Still on you
It can't tell a good source from a bad one. A flawed or biased paper gets reflected back faithfully.
Grounded ≠ correct. It's only as good as what you feed it, so click through the citations for anything you'll rely on.
A curated, queryable literature corpus
Zotero · Mendeley · EndNote
Store and organise references.
Gemini Notebook
Ask questions across them, grounded in the text.
How I use it
- Ramping up fast on an unfamiliar topic: drop in 10–15 key papers, ask for the state of the field and the competing hypotheses.
- Maintaining a standing corpus in an area I already know well, adding to it as I go.
Prompts worth stealing
What do these sources agree and disagree on? What methods have been used to measure X? What hasn't been shown yet?
Meetings you can query later
Record
Voice memo on your phone during the meeting.
Drag in
Drop the audio file straight into a notebook.
Ask
Decisions, action items and topics, weeks later.
- Pulls out action items and answers specific questions like "what did we agree on X?" or "have we discussed Y before?"
- One running notebook per student or project: ask it to summarise the trajectory: where it started, what's changed, what's outstanding.
- Useful for memory checks weeks later, catching up after time away, and writing progress reports.
Confidential material: check what's appropriate to upload before you record sensitive conversations. More under Where to be careful.
Gut microbiome & cancer immunotherapy
A cross-cutting topic, on purpose.
Immunology
Cancer biology
Infectious disease
A handful of real papers are loaded into a notebook ahead of time. The full reference list is in the appendix. I'll ask a couple of questions live and we'll look at where the citations land.
Rebuilding this notebook yourself takes about five minutes with the appendix list.
Questions we'll test live
Two on the day. Hover any block to copy it.
Which bacterial genera are most consistently linked to response to immune checkpoint inhibitors across these papers?
Do the sources agree on whether antibiotics before immunotherapy hurt outcomes? Where do they disagree?
More to try in your own time
What's the proposed mechanism linking gut bacteria to anti-tumour immunity? Summarise the evidence on faecal microbiota transplantation for overcoming checkpoint-inhibitor resistance. Cite each claim. Based only on these sources, what's still unresolved in this field?
Where to be careful
- Not a substitute for reading. It retrieves and summarises, but it doesn't judge quality or novelty for you.
- Source limits vary by plan (see Plans), plus a 500,000-word / 200 MB cap per source.
- No live web access from inside a notebook. It won't know about anything published after you added your sources.
- Sharing a notebook shares your source limit. Collaborators don't get their own quota.
Data & privacy. Uploaded sources go to Google's servers under your Google account. Before uploading, check what's appropriate for unpublished data, patient information, or confidential meeting content, and check your institution's data-handling guidance.
Try it this week
Free to start
notebooklm.google.com, with any Google account.
Start small
One notebook, 8–12 well-chosen sources. Not everything you own.
Explore Studio
Audio overviews, mind maps and briefing docs, all generated from your sources.
Pick a first project
Your next meeting recording, or the reading list for a talk you're prepping.
Take this further
- Gemini Notebook
- notebooklm.google.com
- These slides
- You're looking at them. Hit Reference (bottom right) for one scrollable page, or p to print to PDF.
- Demo source list
- Appendix, next slide.
- Questions after the session
- michael.hall1@uq.edu.au · LinkedIn · mbhall88.github.io
Presenting in this series yourself? Slots are bookable through the ECR Skill Swap Bookings page. Short and practical beats polished and long.
Demo source list
The six papers loaded into the demo notebook. Retrieved via PubMed.
- Gazzaniga & Kasper (2025). The gut microbiome and cancer response to immune checkpoint inhibitors. J Clin Invest · open access (PMC) · 10.1172/JCI184321
- Gopalakrishnan et al. (2018). The influence of the gut microbiome on cancer, immunity, and cancer immunotherapy. Cancer Cell · open access (PMC) · 10.1016/j.ccell.2018.03.015
- Weersma, Zhernakova & Fu (2020). Interaction between drugs and the gut microbiome. Gut · open access (PMC) · 10.1136/gutjnl-2019-320204
- Wong & Yu (2023). Gut microbiota in colorectal cancer development and therapy. Nat Rev Clin Oncol · institutional access · 10.1038/s41571-023-00766-x
- Nobels et al. (2025). The gut microbiome and cancer: from tumorigenesis to therapy. Nat Metab · institutional access · 10.1038/s42255-025-01287-w
- Fernandez, Wargo & Helmink (2025). The microbiome and cancer: a translational science review. JAMA · institutional access · 10.1001/jama.2025.2191