docs: salvage scientific research skills

skills/scientific-thinking-literature-review/SKILL.md

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+---
+name: literature-review
+description: Systematic literature-review workflow for academic, biomedical, technical, and scientific topics, including search planning, source screening, synthesis, citation checks, and evidence logging.
+origin: community
+---
+
+# 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.
+- **Low confidence**: early, speculative, single-source, or weakly measured.
+
+### 8. Verify Citations
+
+Before finalizing:
+
+- verify DOI, PMID, arXiv ID, or official URL
+- check author names and publication year
+- do not cite a paper for a claim it does not make
+- mark preprints as preprints
+- distinguish reviews from primary evidence
+
+## Output Template
+
+```markdown
+# Literature Review: <Topic>
+
+Generated: <date>
+Review type: <narrative | scoping | systematic | meta-analysis>
+Search window: <dates>
+Databases: <list>
+
+## Research Question
+
+## Search Strategy
+
+## Inclusion and Exclusion Criteria
+
+## Evidence Summary
+
+## Thematic Synthesis
+
+## Gaps and Limitations
+
+## References
+
+## Search Log
+```
+
+## Pitfalls
+
+- Do not treat search snippets as evidence.
+- Do not mix preprints, reviews, and primary studies without labeling them.
+- Do not omit negative or conflicting findings.
+- Do not claim systematic-review rigor without a reproducible protocol.
+- Do not use a single database for a broad claim unless the scope is explicitly
+  limited to that database.