Literature Review
Run a structured academic or technical literature review with defined rigor, screening, synthesis, and citation-backed evidence for papers, reports, or product research.
Overview
literature-review is an agent skill most often used in Idea (also Validate, Build) that runs searchable systematic, scoping, or narrative review workflows with screening, synthesis, and citation checks.
Install
npx skills add https://github.com/affaan-m/everything-claude-code --skill literature-reviewWhat is this skill?
- Supports narrative, scoping, systematic, and meta-analysis review types with explicit rigor defaults
- Frames clinical questions with PICO and technical questions with system, method, and outcome axes
- Workflow covers question definition, reproducible search, screening, synthesis, citation checks, and evidence logging
- Defaults to scoping review for exploration and systematic review when publication or clinical claims need reproducibilit
- Produces citation-backed background sections comparable across peer-reviewed papers, preprints, patents, and technical r
- Four review types: narrative, scoping, systematic, and meta-analysis
- Clinical framing uses four PICO elements: Population, Intervention, Comparator, Outcome
Adoption & trust: 1.3k installs on skills.sh; 210k GitHub stars; 2/3 security scanners passed (skills.sh audits).
What problem does it solve?
You have a research or product question but only scattered sources and no reproducible way to screen, synthesize, and cite the literature.
Who is it for?
Indie builders and solo researchers preparing evidence-backed backgrounds, market or tech landscape memos, or publication-oriented systematic reviews.
Skip if: Quick opinion summaries without search protocol, legal/medical decisions without human expert review, or tasks that only need a single URL fetched once.
When should I use this skill?
When building systematic, scoping, or narrative literature reviews; synthesizing state of the art; finding gaps or future work; or preparing citation-backed background for papers and reports.
What do I get? / Deliverables
You get a rigor-appropriate review map with screened sources, synthesized themes, gap analysis, and citation-backed text ready for reports or papers.
- Structured review protocol or scoping plan with search and screening criteria
- Synthesized themes with citation-backed narrative and evidence log
Recommended Skills
Journey fit
Spans multiple journey phases - primary shelf plus alternate fits below.
The canonical shelf is Idea/research because the workflow starts by turning a prompt into a searchable question and mapping the evidence base before build or validation commitments. Search planning, source screening, and synthesis are core research activities that precede scoping prototypes or writing implementation docs.
Where it fits
Map competitor and academic work on an agent-memory architecture before choosing a product direction.
Screen papers and preprints to decide whether a health-adjacent feature claim is supportable in an MVP pitch.
Draft a citation-backed Related Work section for an open-source tool README or technical report.
Summarize evidence trends for a long-form essay or newsletter grounded in recent literature.
How it compares
Use instead of one-shot chat summaries when you need explicit review type, screening rules, and logged evidence like a mini systematic review.
Common Questions / FAQ
Who is literature-review for?
It is for solo builders, indie founders, and technical writers who must synthesize peer-reviewed and gray literature with stated rigor for research, validation, or documentation deliverables.
When should I use literature-review?
Use it in Idea/research to map the state of the art, in Validate/scope to bound claims with evidence, and in Build/docs when drafting citation-backed background sections; pick systematic rigor for publication or clinical claims.
Is literature-review safe to install?
It is a procedural workflow skill without bundled binaries; review the Security Audits panel on this Prism page and verify any external databases or PDF sources your agent retrieves.
SKILL.md
READMESKILL.md - Literature Review
# 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: ```markdown | 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: 1. DOI 2. PMID or arXiv ID 3. exact title 4. normalized title plus first author and year Record how many duplicates were removed. ### 5. Screen Sources Screen in stages: 1. title 2. abstract 3. 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: ```markdown | 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.