Skill guide: /research — literature review across papers, patents and the web

The research skill is the umbrella for literature work. It composes three tracks — papers, patents, and web & industry — into one investigation and one report. Turn a track off in Customize and the skill skips it; leave all three on and it decides per question which ones matter.

When to use it

Any question that starts with "what is known about…": a field overview before a grant, a targeted check before a study, a technology landscape before a patent filing. For a single fact with a source, use /fact instead; for a full study plan, /study.

How to call it

text

/research Does heart rate variability (HRV) biofeedback reduce perceived stress in adults? Focus on randomized controlled trials and report effect sizes.

Or describe what you want without the command — the router picks the skill. Effort matters: Lite is a quick scan, Basic a full review, Deep adds a review pass over the report.

The prompt in a new chat. Basic effort and the model are chosen next to the send button.

What happens

Clarify. If the scope is ambiguous it asks one round of questions (source types, journal tier, time window). "Skip the rest — search now" is always available.
Plan keywords, then search in parallel across OpenAlex, PubMed, Crossref, Semantic Scholar, Europe PMC, ERIC and arXiv — plus Scopus, Web of Science and KCI when your institution's access is connected — with web searches for the meta-analyses and reports it found by name.
Read: it opens the full text of load-bearing sources rather than trusting abstracts, and verifies each source before citing it.
Write: a report where every sentence carries an [n] citation; uncited claims are removed.

Every search is listed with its query and result count as it runs.

What you get

The cited review report (Markdown, editable in the panel, exportable).
A literature screening table (sources with venue tier, year, importance), a sources-by-year chart, a citation graph and a research mind map.
The sources themselves stay in the session — the design, analysis and manuscript steps cite them by number.

The finished report: highlighted sentences are claims; the numbers are the sources behind each one.

Composed of

research-paper — the academic track.
research-patent — the patent track (/patents).
research-web — web & industry sources.

Tips

Ask in the language you want the report in — the first message sets the session language.
Name the study type you care about ("randomized controlled trials", "longitudinal cohorts") and the skill filters for it.
Re-run the same question later: new publications flow into the same structure with changes highlighted.