literature
Literature Skill
CRITICAL RULE: Every citation must be verified to exist before inclusion. Never include a paper you cannot find via web search. Hallucinated citations are worse than no citations.
DOI INTEGRITY RULE: Every DOI must be programmatically verified before entering any .bib file. Sub-agents hallucinate plausible-looking DOIs that resolve to wrong papers (e.g., correct journal prefix, wrong suffix). The ONLY reliable verification is scholarly_verify_dois with title-matching (see Phase 4). A DOI that resolves to a different title than expected is WRONG — treat it the same as a missing DOI.
CITATION KEY RULE: ALWAYS use Better BibTeX-format keys (e.g., Author2016-xx). When merging into an existing .bib, match existing keys. Never generate custom keys (AuthorYear, AuthorKamenica2017, etc.) or retain non-standard keys unless the user explicitly says otherwise.
Python: Always use uv run python. Never bare python, python3, pip, or pip3.
LIBRARY-FIRST RULE: ALWAYS check both Zotero (refpile MCP) and Paperpile (paperpile MCP) BEFORE any external search. Call mcp__refpile__search_library and mcp__paperpile__search_library for the topic in Phase 1. Do not skip this even if no .bib file exists yet. Papers already in either library should be reused, not re-discovered.
PREPRINT RULE: Always prefer the published version. If a paper is found on arXiv, SSRN, NBER, or any working paper series, search for a published journal/conference version using scholarly_search. Only cite a preprint if no published version can be found. This applies at every phase: Phase 2 (discovery), Phase 4 (verification), and Phase 6b (bib-validate runs the full preprint staleness check from bib-validate/references/preprint-check.md).
Comprehensive academic literature workflow: discover, verify, organize, synthesize. Uses parallel sub-agents to search multiple sources, verify citations, and fetch PDFs concurrently.