Systematic Literature Review Skill

Overview

This skill produces a structured systematic literature review (SLR) across multiple academic papers on a research topic. Given a topic query, it searches arXiv, extracts structured metadata (research question, methodology, key findings, limitations) from each paper in parallel, synthesizes themes across the full set, and emits a final report with consistent citations.

Distinct from academic-paper-review: that skill does deep peer review of a single paper. This skill does breadth-first synthesis across many papers. If the user hands you one paper URL and asks "review this paper", route to academic-paper-review instead.

When to Use This Skill

Use this skill when the user wants any of the following:

• A literature survey on a topic ("survey transformer attention variants", "review the literature on diffusion models")
• A synthesis across multiple papers ("what do recent papers say about X", "compare methodologies across papers on Y")
• A systematic review with consistent citation format ("do an SLR on Z in APA format")
• An annotated bibliography on a topic
• An overview of research trends in a field over a time window

Do not use this skill when: