Researchstack Idea Finder

Idea Finder

Read ../references/workflow.md, ../references/venues.md, ../references/conference-story-patterns.md, ../references/novelty-boundary.md, ../references/evidence-contracts.md, and ../references/memory.md.

First decide whether topic choice is actually open.

• If the user wants to preserve a topic, hand off to researchstack-method-synthesis and do not return replacement topics.
• If the user is planning several papers under one direction, hand off to researchstack-program-map.
• Continue here only when problem discovery is wanted.

Flow

1. Establish area, venue family, resource constraints, available artifacts, and excluded directions.
2. Search recent papers, official systems, and mature open-source implementations.
3. Map concrete failures, unexplained phenomena, deployment mismatches, and missing capabilities.
4. Generate a small candidate set across different paper types; do not vary only the application label.
5. For each candidate, identify the closest topic and method competitors.
6. Run researchstack-idea-review and the one-paper envelope.
7. Surface only candidates with an honest contribution and feasible evidence path.

Reject trend labels without a research question, topic novelty backed only by terminology, and directions whose method is ordinary engineering. Do not reject a crowded topic solely because it is crowded; route it to method synthesis when the problem remains important.

For each survivor use assets/topic-card-template.md and include:

• one-paper thesis and paper type,
• why the problem matters now,
• topic state and method state,
• closest topic and method competitors,
• irreducible contribution,
• one or two falsifiable claims,
• minimum evidence path,
• top reviewer objection,
• explicit out-of-scope work,
• idea-review verdict.

Use assets/rejected-directions-template.md for rejected candidates. Distinguish problem weak, method weak, evidence infeasible, and already done rather than collapsing them into one novelty label.