| name | literature-search |
| description | Search external literature and paper candidates with the project's rag_arxiv_retrieve tool. Use when Codex needs to find papers, run literature search, search arXiv-like literature, retrieve candidate papers from a query or problem frame, rank a shortlist, or prepare selected papers for paper-digest, literature-review, or paper-ingest-batch. This is external literature search, not paper-wiki-search. |
Literature Search
Use this skill for external paper discovery. It is a read-only search skill; it does not digest papers and does not update the wiki.
Current project-backed search uses rag_arxiv_retrieve only.
Examples
- User: "search papers about retrieval-augmented agent evaluation" -> use
literature-search.
- User: "use rag_arxiv_retrieve to find candidate papers" -> use
literature-search.
- User: "find existing wiki pages about this topic" -> use
paper-wiki-search, not literature search.
- User: "run a full literature review and synthesize what to search" -> use
literature-review, which may call literature-search.
Workflow
- Start from a validated query, problem frame, or explicit user query.
- Read
references/rag-arxiv-retrieve.md.
- Run one broad
rag_arxiv_retrieve query when the topic is exploratory.
- Run one focused
rag_arxiv_retrieve query when precision matters.
- Deduplicate by arXiv id, URL, normalized title, and author/year.
- Rank candidates by relevance to the problem frame, evidence fit, recency/foundational status, and metadata quality.
- Return a shortlist with enough metadata for
paper-digest or paper-ingest-batch.
Boundaries
Do:
- preserve the tool name and query in
queriesRun
- mark results as metadata or abstract-level evidence
- report failures from
rag_arxiv_retrieve
- ask before falling back to web search unless the user explicitly requested web lookup
Do not:
- call
arxiv_search, crossref_search, or pubmed_search
- write wiki pages
- claim full-paper understanding from search results alone
- search the local literature wiki
- generate a full literature review synthesis; use
literature-review for that
Output
Return:
searchObjectivequeriesRunsourcesConsultedcandidatePapers: title, authors, year or published date, categories, URL, relevance rationale, evidence level, and caveatsrankedShortlistcoverageGapsnextSteps
