Literature Skill

Comprehensive academic literature workflow: discover, verify, organise, synthesise. Uses parallel sub-agents to search multiple sources, verify citations, and fetch PDFs concurrently.

Web alternative: a lighter-weight version of this workflow runs at literature.user.com (packages/literature-workspace/) — keyword/file-upload search across biblio-sources + RefPile, with Sonnet-driven synthesis. Useful for collaborators (CF Access auth) or quick discovery sessions where you don't need vault sync, DOI hard-gating, or pipeline mode. Use the CLI skill when you need verified citations entering a .bib file or full Phase 5 synthesis with negative-evidence + cross-cluster analysis.

Hard Rules

Existential — block submission

These rules protect against the highest-cost failure modes. Violation invalidates the output.

1. 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.
2. Every DOI must be programmatically verified before entering any .bib file. Sub-agents hallucinate plausible-looking DOIs that resolve to wrong papers (correct journal prefix, wrong suffix). The only reliable verification is scholarly scholarly-verify-dois with title-matching (Phase 3). A DOI that resolves to a different title is WRONG — treat it the same as a missing DOI.
3. The narrative synthesis ALWAYS lives at docs/literature-review/literature_summary.md. Never in paper/, paper-*/, or any Overleaf-synced directory. The paper/ directory is LaTeX-only. Markdown files there leak onto Overleaf and pollute the submission folder. Canonical filename: literature_summary.md (never _synthesis.md, synthesis.md, ad-hoc names).

Format — catch in review