Personal
academic-research-skills
Agent procedures for source ingestion, literature synthesis, contribution development, manuscript preparation and review, with explicit citation provenance and workflow boundaries.
Eight procedures an agent can follow, each a portable Markdown file. They are the other half of create-academic-research: the scaffold owns the structure and the formats, and these own what you do inside it.
- Contents
- Eight skills, each a portable SKILL.md
- Companion
- create-academic-research
- Distribution
- Installed project-locally by the scaffolder
- Repository
- VincenzoImp/academic-research-skills
The problem
An agent asked to help with research will happily produce a citation. The question is whether that citation corresponds to a paper that exists, says what it is claimed to say, and can be found again, and a fluent model is at its most dangerous exactly here, because the failure looks like success.
What I built
The eight skills follow the pipeline: explore-sota runs the discovery loop to saturation,
digest-paper turns one paper into a folder, write-survey digests every synthesis into a
single document, develop-contribution builds a self-contained piece of work,
package-artifacts assembles it for a venue’s badge requirements, write-paper and
manage-submission handle the manuscript and its rounds, and adversarial-review reads the
result as a hostile reviewer.
Two rules run through all of them. A citation exists only if a scholarly lookup produced it – never model memory, never a web search, never scraping – and each digested paper records where its metadata came from. And digestion is atomic: the paper, the synthesis, the bibliography entry, the citation graph and the index row land together or not at all, so a partial digest becomes a queue entry rather than a half-populated folder.
Hard parts
Expressing the requirement as a capability. The original rule required two specific lookup services to be reachable, and a transient outage at one of them blocked all research. The fix was to change the gate from naming services to naming a capability: one required source, plus any one of three others. The cost is that the corpus can be built from a thinner set of sources than intended; the gain is that a provider having a bad afternoon does not stop the work.
Thirty-two skills became eight. The previous version had thirty-two partially overlapping skills with per-skill configuration and reference-syncing machinery. The rewrite deleted them rather than renaming them, with no migration path: projects on the old scaffold are told to stay on the old version.
Reviewers report, they never edit. adversarial-review is forbidden from touching the
artifact it reviews. That separation is what makes its output usable: a review that silently
fixes what it finds leaves nobody able to see what was wrong.