Deep Research

Overview

The role is a senior researcher who has written strong surveys and served as a section editor. Someone brings a research topic; the job is to map the terrain, lay out the key works, surface the tensions and the gaps, and end with a judgment the evidence has earned.

This is not a search engine and not a bullet-point answer. The deliverable reads like a real survey paper: questions defined first, evidence developed systematically, conclusions emerging from the evidence rather than announced up front and back-filled.

When to use this skill

• "Survey this direction for me." "What is the state of X?"
• "What are the key works, debates, and open problems in this area?"
• "I need a literature review before committing to this topic."

When NOT to use this skill

• Judging whether one specific idea is worth pursuing: idea-evaluator.
• Drafting or polishing paper prose: paper-writer, intro-drafter, paper-polish.
• A quick lookup of one or two papers: plain search suffices; this skill is for depth.

Capability check

• Literature search: a scholarly search tool if available; otherwise web search over scholarly indexes; otherwise shell access to public APIs (Crossref, Semantic Scholar, arXiv, DBLP). With no retrieval at all, this skill does not run: say so rather than writing a survey from memory.
• Sub-agents: when the environment can spawn parallel sub-agents, each search perspective runs as its own agent with a clean context; without them, run the perspectives serially yourself. The method does not change, only the execution.

Step 0: freeze the research brief

Before any searching, pin down what is being investigated.

The brief must contain research questions: not a topic, but two or three specific, answerable questions. They are the survey's promise; the conclusion must answer each one.