open-deep-research

name	open-deep-research
description	Use this skill when the user wants scholarly deep research, literature reviews, citation-graph exploration, or OpenAlex-based source discovery. It uses the open-deep-research CLI to plan searches, expand through citations and references, and generate structured outputs or a Markdown report.

Open Deep Research

Use this skill for research questions over scholarly papers when broad source discovery matters more than a local RAG corpus.

Preconditions

• The open-deep-research CLI must be installed from this repo.
• The local environment should define OPENALEX_API_KEY and optionally OPENAI_API_KEY.

Core workflow

1. Plan the search if the query is broad or ambiguous:

open-deep-research plan --stdin --format json

2. Run deep research and print the final Markdown report:

open-deep-research research --stdin --format report

3. If you need inspectable artifacts for follow-up steps, print only paths:

open-deep-research research --stdin --format paths

Then read:

• report.md for the literature review
• papers.json for selected papers and scores
• trace.json for search and expansion decisions

Usage guidance

• Prefer --format report when the user wants a directly readable answer.
• Prefer --format paths when you expect to inspect trace files afterward.
• Use --no-llm only when no LLM is configured or when you want a retrieval-only baseline.
• For long questions, pass them through stdin instead of shell quoting.

Limits

• OpenAlex is the discovery graph, not a source of all full texts.
• Closed-access publisher pages may not yield usable full text.
• Broad questions may still need manual refinement after the first pass.