Agent skill · research science · bytedance
systematic-literature-review
Use this skill when the user wants a systematic literature review, survey, or synthesis across multiple academic papers on a topic. Also covers annotated bibliographies and cross-paper comparisons. Searches arXiv and outputs reports in APA, IEEE, or BibTeX format. Not for single-paper tasks — use academic-paper-review for reviewing one paper.
Why this skill is useful
Adds a structured workflow for conducting systematic literature reviews, including specific commands for searching arXiv and synthesizing findings that the AI wouldn't reliably generate on its own.
What it needs
Requires python installed locally. About 11k tokens when loaded. Last updated 2026-08-07. 79,444 stars on the source repository.
What this skill does
Systematic Literature Review Skill Overview This skill produces a structured systematic literature review (SLR) across multiple academic papers on a research topic. Given a topic query, it searches arXiv, extracts structured metadata (research question, methodology, key findings, limitations) from each paper in parallel, synthesizes themes across the full set, and emits a final report with consistent citations. Distinct from academic-paper-review: that skill does deep peer review of a single paper. This skill does breadth-first synthesis across many papers. If the user hands you one paper URL and asks "review this paper", route to academic-paper-review instead. When to Use This Skill Use this skill when the user wants any of the following: A literature survey on a topic ("survey transformer attention variants", "review the literature on diffusion models") A synthesis across multiple papers ("what do recent papers say about X", "compare methodologies across papers on Y") A systematic review with consistent citation format ("do an SLR on Z in APA format") An annotated bibliography on a topic An overview of research trends in a field over a time window Do not use this skill when: The user provides exactly one paper and asks to review it (use academic-paper-review) The user asks a factual question that does not require synthesizing multiple sources (answer directly) The user wants general web research without academic rigor (use standard web search) Workflow The workflow has five phases. Follow them in order. Phase 1: Plan Before doing any retrieval, confirm the following with the user. If any of these are unclear, ask one clarifying question that covers the missing pieces. Do not ask one question at a time. Topic: the research area in plain English (e.g. "transformer attention variants"). Scope: how many papers (default 20, hard upper bound 50), optional time window (e.g. "last 2 years"), optional arXiv category (e.g. cs.CL, cs.CV). …
How to use it
Reference it in AdaL, Claude Code, Cursor or any coding agent — nothing to install:
@skills bytedance/systematic-literature-review