literature-review

name	literature-review
description	Plan and run literature review discovery work. Use when Codex needs to generate or validate literature search queries, coordinate literature search, build a ranked paper shortlist, or prepare selected papers for paper-digest, paper-ingest-batch, or paper wiki work. Use problem-frame first when the research objective is broad, ambiguous, or underspecified.

Literature Review

Use this skill for the discovery layer before papers become digests or wiki pages.

This skill owns literature review strategy, query generation, query validation, literature-search orchestration, and shortlist handoff. It does not own problem framing, the low-level literature search tool call, persistent wiki retrieval, wiki query answering, digest extraction, or wiki ingest.

Examples

• User: "find papers about tool-augmented LLM evaluation" -> use literature-review.
• User: "generate and validate search queries for this research question" -> use literature-review.
• User: "search recent papers and give me a shortlist to ingest" -> use literature-review, then call literature-search.
• User: "what does my existing wiki say about this?" -> use paper-wiki-query, not literature review.
• User: "ingest these selected papers into the wiki" -> use paper-ingest-batch.

Workflow

1. Use problem-frame first when the request is broad, ambiguous, or underspecified.
2. Generate search query families from the frame, question, or seed papers. Read references/search-query-generation.md.
3. Validate high-stakes, broad, or expensive query plans. Read references/search-query-validation.md.
4. Call literature-search to run the external literature search with rag_arxiv_retrieve.
5. Return a shortlist with metadata and a clear handoff to paper-digest or paper-ingest-batch.

Skip steps only when the user has already supplied an equivalent artifact, such as a precise query or a curated paper list.

Boundaries

Do:

• use problem-frame for research-objective clarification
• use literature-search for external paper retrieval
• distinguish external paper discovery from local wiki search
• preserve uncertainty about metadata, snippets, and paper relevance
• use live lookup when current papers, precise metadata, URLs, DOI status, or recent work matter
• recommend digest or batch ingest only after candidate papers are selected

Do not:

• write wiki pages
• treat search snippets as full-paper evidence
• claim to have read papers unless full text was actually inspected
• answer from the persistent wiki; use paper-wiki-query for that
• search the local wiki; use paper-wiki-search for that
• call rag_arxiv_retrieve directly when literature-search can own the search step

Handoff

When the user selects papers, hand off to:

• paper-digest for one paper
• paper-ingest-batch for multiple papers
• paper-wiki-query when the question should be answered from existing wiki pages