Run academic literature reviews from seed papers
Real-world thread: the poster made a lightweight agent skill for literature reviews because general chatbots were missing relevant papers and citation tracing. The skill starts from seed papers, follows references backward and citations forward, screens the papers it locates, and iteratively refines the review; the workflow is partly hard-coded/scripted and meant to run inside tools such as Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI, or OpenClaw. In the poster’s tests, the final review was better than a generic AI-generated document, especially on coverage and paper selection.
- Agent or tool
- Custom agent
- Topic
- Research & Data
- Reported on
- Added
- 2026-10-15
Why it matters
Research is mostly gathering, cleaning and comparing. Handing that groundwork to an agent leaves the person with the part that needs judgment: deciding what the findings mean. It is one of 67 sightings filed under Research & Data on Agent Sightings (number 56 by interest), and one of 182 involving Custom agent.
How you could try it
Here is a reusable prompt, written by us in our own words, that captures the task. Paste it into your own agent or any similar agent and adjust the details to your situation.
Research brief: run academic literature reviews from seed papers. Prefer primary sources, include links and confidence notes, and do not contact anyone.
Tip: Start small: run it once on a low-stakes example, read what the agent did, and only then let it run on real work.
Source
Read the original first-hand account on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/AIToolBench/comments/1su9rqu/i_built_a_agent_skill_for…. Our summary is a paraphrase; details are in the source.