Research Artifacts

Research Artifacts

Research records the external evidence behind a decision: technology evaluations, library comparisons, industry-practice surveys. Research is dated, sourced, and append-only — a snapshot of what the evidence said at a point in time, not a living opinion.

This skill defines how research is organized, formatted, and indexed. The deep-research skill defines how it is gathered and cross-verified; living-docs owns the decisions and issues it feeds. The three compose. Research artifacts are OKF concepts — see the okf-knowledge-format skill for the frontmatter/reserved-file rules applied here.

Using this skill (progressive disclosure)

This SKILL.md is a slim stub — a trigger plus a task->topic router. The living-docs CLI holds the full research rules, source discipline, structure and traceable chain, and discloses them progressively. Before authoring anything, load the topic for your task:

• living-docs skill research-artifacts --list — discover every topic.
• living-docs skill research-artifacts --topic <topic> — load that topic.

Piped output is minified JSON (machine default); --plain for human text, --json to force JSON. Topics: rules, structure, research-report, research-index, research-general-references, about.

This stub is a pure router (ADR 0017): it triggers and points at topics — it holds no rules inline. The source discipline and the research → decision → issue chain are topics, loaded before authoring via --topic rules / --topic structure.

When to invoke

• Recording the output of a research session into docs/research/ — living-docs skill research-artifacts --topic research-report.
• Structuring or indexing a research note (docs/research/NNNN-<slug>.md + the index listing + the general roll-up) — living-docs skill research-artifacts --topic research-index / --topic research-general-references for the templates, --topic structure for the layout rules.
• Enforcing source discipline on a draft (primary sources, vendor-COI flags, inference-vs-fact labels, confidence levels, fetch-failure notes) — living-docs skill research-artifacts --topic rules.
• Wiring the research → decision → issue traceable chain (an accepted recommendation must reach an ADR/BDR and then issues, in living-docs) — living-docs skill research-artifacts --topic structure.