brycewang-stanford/literature-review

Literature Review Evidence Mapper

Heritage and scope

This is an original Open Science Skills workflow for experimental and computational social science. It remixes high-level ideas from Cheng-I Wu's Academic Research Skills for Claude Code (CC BY-NC 4.0), especially evidence mapping, source verification, and mode separation between narrative literature review and formal systematic review. It is not a full ARS pipeline and should not copy ARS prose.

Instructions

1. Classify the review task

Decide what the user needs:

• Narrative/theory review: organize concepts, mechanisms, and debates for an introduction.
• Design precedent review: identify prior treatments, measures, samples, estimands, or analysis strategies.
• Contribution audit: test whether the claimed gap survives contact with the closest prior work.
• Evidence map: summarize what each study establishes, where it applies, and what remains unresolved.
• Systematic-review escalation: when the user needs exhaustive search, screening, risk-of-bias, and PRISMA reporting.

Default to a narrative/evidence-map review unless the user explicitly asks for a systematic review, meta-analysis, or PRISMA-compliant output.

2. Define the question and boundaries

Before summarizing papers, specify:

• Research question or review question.
• Population, setting, outcome, treatment/exposure, and mechanism scope.
• Disciplines and literatures that must be included.
• Time window and language restrictions, if any.
• Inclusion/exclusion logic for sources.
• What counts as "closest prior work."

If the user only gives a broad topic, first produce a short scoping memo with 2-4 possible review boundaries rather than writing a generic review.

3. Build the source base

Use the user's supplied sources first. Then identify obvious missing source classes:

• Seminal theoretical anchors.
• Most recent directly related empirical work.
• Meta-analyses, registered reports, study registries, or working-paper series.
• Methods papers that justify the research design.
• Null findings, failed replications, or unpublished registered studies when visible.
• Adjacent literatures that use different vocabulary for the same construct.

Run citation-check when the source list is large, messy, DOI-heavy, or likely to contain stale working papers.

4. Extract evidence, not summaries

For each important source, record:

• Claim actually supported: one sentence, no inflation.
• Design and identification: sample, setting, treatment/exposure, comparison, outcome, estimand, and key limitations.
• Observable implication: what the source lets a reader expect in the user's setting.
• Boundary condition: where the finding may fail.
• Use in the user's paper: background, theory, design precedent, measurement precedent, competing explanation, or gap support.

Do not produce chronological "Author A says X, Author B says Y" prose unless chronology is theoretically important.

5. Cluster the literature

Organize sources into 3-6 clusters. Prefer conceptual or mechanism clusters over method-only clusters:

• Mechanism families.
• Competing theories.
• Measurement traditions.
• Empirical settings or populations.
• Identification strategies.
• Evidence-quality tiers.

For each cluster, state what is settled, what is contested, and what would change the interpretation.

6. Test the claimed gap

Write a gap verdict:

• Holds: no close prior work answers the same question with the same population/mechanism/design.
• Partly holds: prior work answers part of it; the contribution must be narrowed.
• Does not hold: the claimed contribution is already established; reframe as replication, extension, boundary test, or synthesis.
• Cannot assess: missing sources or inaccessible source text prevent judgment.

When the gap is weak, propose a better contribution frame rather than only criticizing it.

7. Compose with sibling skills

• Use narrative-building after the evidence map exists to turn the review into the "Why-to-If-Then" funnel.
• Use hypothesis-building when the review implies falsifiable expectations and estimands.
• Use pre-registration-writing when the review supports confirmatory hypotheses.
• Use methods-reporting when reviewing how prior studies report designs, sample flow, and transparency.
• Use journal-review when auditing someone else's manuscript for novelty and placement.

Output

Produce a Literature Review Evidence Map:

# Literature Review Evidence Map

Review question:
Scope and exclusions:
Search/source base:
Gap verdict: Holds / Partly holds / Does not hold / Cannot assess

## Closest Prior Work
| Source | What it actually establishes | Boundary | Relation to user's claim |

## Evidence Clusters
### Cluster 1: <name>
Settled:
Contested:
Missing:
Key sources:

## Contribution Diagnosis
Claimed gap:
Verdict:
Better contribution frame:

## Literature Review Architecture
1. <section purpose>
2. <section purpose>
3. <section purpose>

## Sentences the Review Must Earn
- <sentence-level claim that needs source support>

## Sources Needing Verification
| Source | Why |

Quality checks

• [ ] The review question and scope are explicit.
• [ ] Closest prior work is identified before novelty is judged.
• [ ] Each key source is tied to an observable implication or boundary condition.
• [ ] The output distinguishes settled evidence from contested evidence.
• [ ] The gap verdict is calibrated, not inflated.
• [ ] Publication bias, registered studies, and null findings were considered when relevant.
• [ ] citation-check was invoked or recommended when source integrity was uncertain.
• [ ] The synthesis plan can feed directly into narrative-building.