Systematic Literature Review Skill

Overview

This skill produces a structured systematic literature review (SLR) across multiple academic papers on a research topic. Given a topic query, it searches arXiv, extracts structured metadata (research question, methodology, key findings, limitations) from each paper in parallel, synthesizes themes across the full set, and emits a final report with consistent citations.

Distinct from academic-paper-review: that skill does deep peer review of a single paper. This skill does breadth-first synthesis across many papers. If the user hands you one paper URL and asks "review this paper", route to academic-paper-review instead.

When to Use This Skill

Use this skill when the user wants any of the following:

• A literature survey on a topic ("survey transformer attention variants", "review the literature on diffusion models")
• A synthesis across multiple papers ("what do recent papers say about X", "compare methodologies across papers on Y")
• A systematic review with consistent citation format ("do an SLR on Z in APA format")
• An annotated bibliography on a topic
• An overview of research trends in a field over a time window

Do not use this skill when:

• The user provides exactly one paper and asks to review it (use academic-paper-review)
• The user asks a factual question that does not require synthesizing multiple sources (answer directly)
• The user wants general web research without academic rigor (use standard web search)

Workflow

The workflow has five phases. Follow them in order.

Phase 1: Plan

Before doing any retrieval, confirm the following with the user. If any of these are unclear, ask one clarifying question that covers the missing pieces. Do not ask one question at a time.