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:

| Database | Date searched | Query | Filters | Results | Export |

| --- | --- | --- | --- | ---: | --- |

| PubMed | 2026-05-11 | `("CRISPR"[tiab] OR "Cas9"[tiab]) AND "sickle cell"[tiab]` | 2020:2026, English | 86 | PMID list |

| arXiv | 2026-05-11 | `CRISPR sickle cell gene editing` | q-bio, 2020:2026 | 9 | BibTeX |

Save raw IDs, URLs, DOIs, abstracts, and notes separately from the final prose.

4. Deduplicate

Deduplicate in this order:

• DOI

• PMID or arXiv ID

• exact title

• normalized title plus first author and year

Record how many duplicates were removed.

5. Screen Sources

Screen in stages:

• title

• abstract

• full text

For systematic work, record exclusion reasons:

• wrong population

• wrong intervention

• wrong outcome

• not primary research

• duplicate

• unavailable full text

• outside date range

6. Extract Data

Use a structured extraction table:

| Study | Design | Population/Data | Method | Comparator | Outcome | Key finding | Limitations |

| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |

| Author Year | RCT/cohort/review/etc. | sample or corpus | method | baseline | measured outcome | result | caveat |

For technical papers, include dataset, benchmark, metric, baseline, and

reproducibility notes.

7. Synthesize

Group evidence by theme rather than summarizing papers one by one.

Useful synthesis lenses:

• strongest evidence

• conflicting evidence

• methodological weaknesses

• population or dataset limits

• recency and replication

• practical implications

• unanswered questions

Separate claims by confidence:

• High confidence: replicated, high-quality evidence across sources.

• Medium confidence: plausible but limited by sample, method, or recency.

• Low confidence: early, speculative, single-source, or weakly measured.

8. Verify Citations

Before finalizing:

• verify DOI, PMID, arXiv ID, or official URL

• check author names and publication year

• do not cite a paper for a claim it does not make

• mark preprints as preprints

• distinguish reviews from primary evidence

Output Template

# Literature Review: <Topic>

Generated: <date>

Review type: <narrative | scoping | systematic | meta-analysis>

Search window: <dates>

Databases: <list>

## Research Question

## Search Strategy

## Inclusion and Exclusion Criteria

## Evidence Summary

## Thematic Synthesis

## Gaps and Limitations

## References

## Search Log

Pitfalls

• Do not treat search snippets as evidence.

• Do not mix preprints, reviews, and primary studies without labeling them.

• Do not omit negative or conflicting findings.

• Do not claim systematic-review rigor without a reproducible protocol.

• Do not use a single database for a broad claim unless the scope is explicitly

limited to that database.