Literature Review Skill for Claude
Conduct comprehensive literature reviews using multi-perspective dialogue simulation. Generate diverse expert personas, conduct grounded Q&A conversations, and synthesize findings into structured knowledge. Use when starting a new research project or writing a survey section.
Install
one command, takes just this skill from the repositorynpx skills add https://github.com/lingzhi227/agent-research-skills --skill literature-reviewThe instruction itself
12 sections, as written by the authorLiterature Review
Conduct deep literature reviews through multi-perspective dialogue and systematic search.
Input
$0— Research topic or question$1— Optional: specific focus or angle
References
- Multi-perspective dialogue prompts (STORM):
~/.claude/skills/literature-review/references/dialogue-prompts.md - Literature review workflow (AgentLaboratory):
~/.claude/skills/literature-review/references/review-workflow.md
Scripts (from literature-search skill)
# Search Semantic Scholar
python ~/.claude/skills/deep-research/scripts/search_semantic_scholar.py --query "topic" --max-results 20
# Search OpenAlex
python ~/.claude/skills/literature-search/scripts/search_openalex.py --query "topic" --max-results 20
# Search arXiv
python ~/.claude/skills/deep-research/scripts/search_arxiv.py --query "topic" --max-results 10
Workflow
Step 1: Generate Expert Personas (from STORM)
Given the topic, create 3-5 diverse expert personas:
- Each represents a different perspective, role, or research angle
- Example: "ML systems researcher focused on efficiency", "Theoretical statistician concerned with guarantees"
- Use the persona generation prompts from references
Step 2: Multi-Perspective Dialogue
For each persona, simulate a multi-turn Q&A conversation:
- Persona asks a question from their unique angle
- Generate search queries from the question
- Search literature using the search scripts
- Synthesize an answer grounded in retrieved papers with inline citations
- Record the dialogue turn with search results
- Repeat for 3-5 turns per persona
- End when persona says "Thank you so much for your help!"
Step 3: Synthesize Knowledge
- Combine all persona conversations into a unified knowledge base
- Remove redundancy across personas
- Organize by theme/subtopic
- Generate an outline based on the collected information
Step 4: Generate Literature Review
- Write a structured review organized by the generated outline
- Every claim must be supported by a citation
- Include a summary table of key papers (method, contribution, limitations)
Output
A structured literature review with:
- Outline — Hierarchical topic structure
- Per-section summaries — Each grounded in retrieved papers
- Paper database — Structured entries for all reviewed papers
- Knowledge gaps — Identified areas needing further investigation
Rules
- Every sentence in the review must be supported by gathered information
- If information is not found, explicitly state the gap
- Cite broadly — cover diverse approaches, not just the most popular
- Include recent papers (last 2-3 years) alongside foundational work
- Use inline citations: "Smith et al. [1] propose..."
Related Skills
- Upstream: literature-search, deep-research
- Downstream: related-work-writing, research-planning
- See also: survey-generation
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How to use it
Take lingzhi227/literature-review from the repository into ~/.claude/skills for personal
use, or into .claude/skills inside a project.
The agent identifies a skill by the name field in its header. Two skills with the
same name cannot sit side by side — one of them will be ignored.