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 -…