Run academic literature reviews from seed papers
Poster built an agent skill that starts from seed papers, searches backward and forward, screens candidates, and iteratively refines a literature review. Task: Suggested implementation: Develop a lightweight agent skill to perform academic literature reviews starting from seed papers. The workflow involves tracing references backward and citations forward, screening discovered papers, and iteratively refining the review draft. This process is partly hard-coded or scripted rather than fully autonomous, requiring human oversight for relevance screening and final validation.; tools: custom-built or unnamed agent. Human role: The original post does not say how a person stayed involved.; limitations: The workflow is not fully autonomous; it relies on hard-coded scripts and requires human intervention for screening. Source reliability is low due to a 403 error preventing direct access to the original Reddit post. Integration uncertainty exists regarding which specific tools support this scripted agent. Proposed advice: Validate tool compatibility and define clear human approval gates before deployment..
Tools
custom-built or unnamed agent
Published on Agent Work Atlas:
Overview
Poster built an agent skill that starts from seed papers, searches backward and forward, screens candidates, and iteratively refines a literature review.
Workflow
Suggested implementation: Develop a lightweight agent skill to perform academic literature reviews starting from seed papers. The workflow involves tracing references backward and citations forward, screening discovered papers, and iteratively refining the review draft. This process is partly hard-coded or scripted rather than fully autonomous, requiring human oversight for relevance screening and final validation.
Reported result
Outcome status is unknown as no quantitative metrics or specific failure cases were provided in the source. The author claimed the final review had better coverage and paper selection than generic AI-generated documents. To verify this, conduct a controlled comparison measuring the percentage of relevant papers captured against a manual search baseline.
Human role
The original post does not say how a person stayed involved.
Limitations
The workflow is not fully autonomous; it relies on hard-coded scripts and requires human intervention for screening. Source reliability is low due to a 403 error preventing direct access to the original Reddit post. Integration uncertainty exists regarding which specific tools support this scripted agent. Proposed advice: Validate tool compatibility and define clear human approval gates before deployment.
Try it
Act as a research assistant. I need to build a literature review agent for [replaceable: specific academic topic]. Use [replaceable: seed paper titles or DOIs] as starting points. Step 1: Trace backward references and forward citations for these seeds. Step 2: Compile a candidate list. Step 3: I will manually screen this list for relevance. Step 4: Generate a draft review based on the screened papers. Step 5: Iterate the draft based on my feedback. Output format: A structured markdown document with sections for Introduction, Methodology, Findings, and Conclusion, plus a bibliography. Measure success by comparing the number of relevant papers found against a manual search of the same topic. Handle missing inputs by asking for additional seed papers. Do not publish or spend resources without my explicit confirmation. Perform a dry run with 2 seed papers first.
Source reports are not independently verified. Publication date is the catalog publication date, not the original article date.