brycewang-stanford Getting Started with Research Superpowers
Research Superpowers gives Claude Code systematic workflows for literature searching and review.
Focus: Finding, screening, and extracting data from published papers. NOT for analyzing experimental data or designing experiments.
What You Can Do
Use these skills for systematic literature reviews:
- Search literature - PubMed and Semantic Scholar integration
- Build screening rubrics - Define and test relevance criteria collaboratively
- Screen papers - Two-stage screening (abstract → deep dive) with scoring
- Extract data - Find specific methods, results, measurements from papers
- Traverse citations - Smart backward/forward citation following
- Large-scale screening - Parallel subagent processing for 50+ papers
- Track findings - Organized research sessions with summaries, PDFs, and deduplication
Available Skills
Literature Search & Review Skills (skills/research/)
- answering-research-questions - Main orchestration workflow (search → screen → extract → synthesize)
- building-screening-rubrics - Collaborative rubric design with test-driven refinement
- searching-literature - PubMed search with keyword optimization
- evaluating-paper-relevance - Two-stage screening (abstract → deep dive)
- subagent-driven-review - Parallel screening for large searches (50+ papers)
- checking-chembl - Check if medicinal chemistry papers have curated SAR data in ChEMBL
- traversing-citations - Semantic Scholar citation network traversal
- finding-open-access-papers - Unpaywall API to find free versions of paywalled papers
- cleaning-up-research-sessions - Safe cleanup of intermediate files after research complete
Basic Workflow
When user asks a literature search question:
- Read answering-research-questions skill - Main orchestration
- Announce: "I'm using the Answering Research Questions skill"
- Parse query - Extract keywords, data types, constraints
- Create research folder - Propose name, initialize tracking
- Optional: Build rubric - For large searches (50+ papers), use building-screening-rubrics skill
- Search → Screen → Extract → Traverse - Follow the workflow
- Check in regularly - Every 10 papers, checkpoint every 50
Research Session Folders
Each query creates a folder in research-sessions/:
research-sessions/YYYY-MM-DD-query-description/
├── SUMMARY.md # Main findings
├── papers-reviewed.json # Deduplication tracking (DOI → status)
├── papers/ # Downloaded PDFs and supplementary data
└── citations/ # Citation graph tracking
Core Principles
For systematic literature review:
- Precision over breadth - Find papers with specific data you need, not just topical matches
- Test-driven screening - Build and validate rubrics before bulk processing
- Smart citation following - Only traverse relevant citations to avoid exponential explosion
- Deduplicate aggressively - Track ALL reviewed papers by DOI (even non-relevant)
- Cache abstracts - Save for re-screening when rubrics change
- Report progress - Update user every 10 papers as work proceeds
- Checkpoint frequently - Ask to continue or stop every 50 papers
- Reproducible - Save rubrics, queries, and methodology with research sessions
API Information
PubMed E-utilities (no key required):
- Search:
https://eutils.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/eutils/esearch.fcgi - Details:
https://eutils.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/eutils/esummary.fcgi - Full text:
https://eutils.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/eutils/efetch.fcgi
Semantic Scholar (free tier works, optional key for higher limits):
- Paper:
https://api.semanticscholar.org/graph/v1/paper/DOI:{doi} - References:
https://api.semanticscholar.org/graph/v1/paper/{id}/references - Citations:
https://api.semanticscholar.org/graph/v1/paper/{id}/citations
Finding Skills
Use the find-skills script to search for relevant skills:
# From project directory
./scripts/find-skills # List all skills
./scripts/find-skills literature # Search for "literature"
./scripts/find-skills 'cite|ref' # Regex search
Remember
- Always start by reading the relevant research skill
- Announce skill usage when you begin
- Track everything in the research folder
- Check in with user regularly during long searches
- Deduplicate using papers-reviewed.json (DOI as key)