scientific-thinking-literature-reviewlisted

# 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