Agent skill · research science · affaan-m
literature-review
Systematic literature-review workflow for academic, biomedical, technical, and scientific topics, including search planning, source screening, synthesis, citation checks, and evidence logging. Use when the task is to find, screen, synthesize, and cite a body of academic or technical literature.
Why this skill is useful
Provides a systematic workflow for conducting literature reviews, including specific methodologies and structured data extraction templates that the AI wouldn't reliably generate on its own.
What it needs
About 3k tokens when loaded. Last updated 2026-08-06. 238,342 stars on the source repository.
What this skill does
Literature Review Use this skill when the task is to find, screen, synthesize, and cite a body of academic or technical literature. When to Use Building a systematic, scoping, or narrative literature review. Synthesizing the state of the art for a research question. Finding gaps, contradictions, or future-work directions. Preparing citation-backed background sections for papers or reports. Comparing evidence across peer-reviewed papers, preprints, patents, and technical reports. Review Types Narrative review: broad synthesis; useful for orientation. Scoping review: maps concepts, methods, and evidence gaps. Systematic review: predefined protocol, reproducible search, explicit screening and exclusion. Meta-analysis: systematic review plus quantitative effect aggregation. Ask the user which level of rigor is needed. If unspecified, default to a scoping review for exploratory work and a systematic review for publication or clinical claims. Workflow 1. Define the Question Convert the prompt into a searchable research question. For clinical or biomedical work, use PICO: Population Intervention or exposure Comparator Outcome For technical work, use: system or domain method or intervention comparison baseline evaluation metric 2. Plan the Search Create a search protocol before collecting sources: databases to search date range languages publication types inclusion criteria exclusion criteria exact search strings Minimum useful database set: PubMed for biomedical and life-sciences literature. arXiv for CS, math, physics, quantitative biology, and preprints. Semantic Scholar or Crossref for broad academic discovery. Domain-specific sources when relevant, such as clinical-trial registries, patent databases, standards bodies, or official technical docs. 3. Search and Log Evidence Keep a search log that makes the review reproducible: Save raw IDs, URLs, DOIs, abstracts, and notes separately from the final prose. 4. Deduplicate Deduplicate in this order: 1. DOI 2. …
How to use it
Reference it in AdaL, Claude Code, Cursor or any coding agent — nothing to install:
@skills affaan-m/scientific-thinking-literature-review--f1b125