Turn a vague research topic or question into a tree of distinct research directions — each with concrete sub-angles, keywords, and ready-to-run academic search queries — so a researcher who has a topic but doesn't know where to focus gets a map of the field's real, separate lines of work. Use this skill WHENEVER the user has a topic and wants to scope or narrow it: "I want to research X but don't know the angle", "help me find research directions / angles / sub-topics for my thesis on ...", "narrow down this topic", "what are the different ways to approach ...", "give me a research question on ...", "break this topic into directions", or pastes a broad area and asks where to focus. Trigger even when the tool isn't named. Every direction stays anchored to the user's own vocabulary (no drifting into unrelated fields) and ships a search query you can paste straight into a database or the paper-search skill. Pure reasoning — no scripts, no web access.
2026-06-11