Research Ideation

A goal-driven workflow for finding important research problems, designing novel solutions, and building deep field understanding through structured paper reading.

When to Use This Skill

• User wants to find a research direction or brainstorm research ideas
• User needs to do a literature review or map a research field
• User asks about evaluating whether an idea is novel or worth pursuing
• User wants to read papers more effectively or build a systematic reading habit
• User mentions "research ideation", "find a problem", "literature tree", "novelty check", "paper reading"

Goal-Driven Research Workflow

Follow these five steps in order. Each step builds on the previous one.

Step 1: Define a Long-Term Research Goal

Start with a goal that has both scientific and practical value. The goal should be ambitious enough to sustain multiple papers, but concrete enough to guide daily decisions.

Ask: "What is the ultimate form of this research direction? What would the world look like if this problem were fully solved?"

Step 2: Build a Literature Tree

Map the field by constructing two complementary trees:

• Novelty tree: Classify existing work by milestone tasks, representative pipelines, and novel modules. This reveals WHERE the field has gaps.
• Challenge-insight tree: Collect technical challenges and the insights/techniques that address them. This reveals WHICH problems lack good solutions.

See references/literature-tree.md for the full construction method and four types of novelty.

Step 3: Select a Problem

Find tasks with genuine research space. The key question: "Is this problem worth solving, or has a well-established solution already claimed this territory?"

Use the well-established solution check (4 levels) to decide whether to proceed or switch problems. Actively seek new failure cases rather than improving on known benchmarks.

See references/problem-selection.md for the full selection framework.

Step 4: Design a Solution

Novel techniques are creative combinations of existing methods, not simple concatenations. Use two design patterns:

• Cross-domain transfer: Find papers in completely different domains that solve a technically similar problem, then adapt their solution.
• Problem decomposition: Break the problem into sub-problems, solve each via cross-domain transfer, then combine.

See references/solution-design.md for the full design methodology and knowledge distillation pipeline.

Step 5: Validate and Iterate

Run experiments on representative data. Use results to refine your understanding. If the approach fails, return to Step 3 or Step 4 with updated knowledge from the failure.

Output artifacts: Research direction summary (problem statement, proposed approach, novelty claim, key risks) — this becomes the input to idea-tournament or paper-planning.

See the experiment-craft skill for systematic debugging when experiments don't work as expected.

Counterintuitive Ideation Rules

Prioritize these rules before regular ideation:

1. Problem selection matters more than solution design: Choosing WHAT to solve has more impact than HOW you solve it. A great solution to an unimportant problem is still unimportant.
2. Pursue new failure cases, not incremental improvements: Don't improve a technique on its original setting. Find new settings where it breaks — new failure cases on new data are contributions even if the technique itself isn't novel.
3. If a well-established solution exists, switch problems: Solving an already-solved problem wastes time regardless of your angle. Improvement space is too small.
4. Technology is creative combination, not concatenation: Novel techniques combine existing methods in non-obvious ways. Simple A-to-B pipelines are not contributions — if direct concatenation worked, the problem would have no technical challenge.
5. When a breakthrough tool appears, apply it to YOUR roadmap: Don't improve the tool itself on its original benchmarks. Use it to solve YOUR milestone tasks — this produces high-impact work because you combine the tool's power with your domain expertise.
6. A paper without real contribution wastes your time: Even if accepted, it doesn't advance the field or earn respect. Do work that genuinely moves the needle.

Structured Paper Reading

Turn reading into structured Q&A using a paper parsing tree. Three levels of depth:

Level	Goal	What You Can Do After
1. Technical	Understand all details and terminology	Reproduce the method; explain each component
2. Analytical	Know what problem it solves and why this approach	Explain the paper's motivation and design choices
3. Contextual	Know its position in the literature tree	Update your field map; generate new research questions

Write a structured summary for every paper you read. Use the template at assets/paper-summary-template.md.

See references/paper-reading.md for the full reading methodology and habit-building guidance.

Handoff to Idea Tournament or Planning

When you have a research direction but want to explore multiple concrete approaches, pass to idea-tournament for tree-structured generation and Elo ranking before planning.

When ideation is complete — you have a problem, a proposed solution approach, and supporting literature — pass these artifacts to paper-planning:

Artifact	Source Step	Used By
Research goal and scope	Step 1	Story design (task definition)
Literature tree (novelty + challenge-insight)	Step 2	Related work mapping, novelty claims
Problem statement and motivation	Step 3	Introduction motivation paragraphs
Solution sketch and design rationale	Step 4	Method section planning
Key failure cases to address	Step 3	Experiment planning (stress tests)
Relevant prior work and their limitations	Step 2	Baseline selection, comparison design

Reference Navigation

Topic	Reference File	When to Use
Literature tree construction	literature-tree.md	Mapping a research field
Problem selection	problem-selection.md	Evaluating whether a problem is worth solving
Solution design	solution-design.md	Designing a novel approach
Paper reading methodology	paper-reading.md	Reading papers effectively
Paper summary template	paper-summary-template.md	Writing structured paper notes