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literature-review

Category: literature-review · License: MIT · Version: 1.8 · Includes scripts Tags: literature review, systematic review, PubMed, arXiv, evidence synthesis, citations

When to use it

Runs systematic literature reviews by searching PubMed, arXiv, bioRxiv, and Semantic Scholar (plus web search via parallel-cli), screening studies, extracting data, synthesizing themes, and verifying citations with verify_citations.py. Produces a markdown and PDF review with a PRISMA-style flow diagram and a bibliography in APA, Nature, or Vancouver style. Use when conducting a systematic or scoping review, synthesizing research on a topic, writing the literature review section of a paper or thesis, identifying research gaps, or checking citations in a review. Not for looking up a single paper or database record; use the specific database skill instead.

Example requests

Ask your agent in plain language, for example:
  • “Can you do a systematic review of intermittent fasting and cognitive decline in older adults? I need a PDF at the end.”
  • “I’m writing chapter 2 of my thesis on transformer-based protein language models for variant effect prediction. I’ve got about 40 papers in refs/plm_papers.bib from arXiv and bioRxiv. Draft the literature review section in Vancouver style, group it by theme rather than paper-by-paper, flag research gaps, and run verify_citations.py on the bibliography because my advisor caught two wrong DOIs last time.”
  • “My lab wants to know what’s actually known about microplastics crossing the blood-brain barrier and where the evidence is thin. Nobody has mapped this out yet. Can you pull together what’s out there and give us something we can circulate?”

Install

In Claude Code you can also add the marketplace with /plugin marketplace add KalarisLabs/research-agent-skills and install the whole literature-review category with /plugin install literature-review@research-agent-skills.

Full playbook

Read SKILL.md for the complete workflow, references and any scripts. The agent installer copies the full skill folder.
Last modified on October 19, 2026