Individual skill

literature-review

Produces a thematic literature review that organizes a field into an argument - consensus, disputes, evidence quality, and the open gap the reader should care about. Use when someone asks "write my related-work section", "review the literature on X", "what does the research say about X", or "organize these papers into themes". Do NOT use for an exhaustive, protocol-registered review with formal inclusion criteria and risk-of-bias appraisal - use systematic-review instead. Do NOT use for synthesizing interviews or mixed non-academic sources into decision themes - use research-synthesis instead.

skills/literature-review/SKILL.md

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claude Repository topic
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skill-me Repository topic
research Derived category
productivity Derived category

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# Literature Review

A literature review is an argument about the state of knowledge, not a list of summaries. The failure it prevents is the annotated bibliography in disguise - one paragraph per paper, no comparison, no position - which readers skip and reviewers reject because it demonstrates reading, not understanding. Every section must compare works against each other and end somewhere: a consensus, a live dispute, or a gap.

## Operating procedure

### Step 1: Gather inputs

Collect before writing:

- The guiding question or claim the review serves (a thesis chapter, a paper's related-work section, a research proposal, a decision memo). Default framing if none given: "What is known, what is contested, and what is missing about X?"
- The corpus: papers supplied, or search scope (fields, venues, timeframe) if collection is part of the job.
- Audience and length target (a related-work section runs 800-1,500 words; a standalone review 3,000+).
- Inclusion posture: representative coverage is the default; if the user says "every study, defensibly complete," stop and route to systematic-review - that job needs a protocol.