Academic Scientific Research

Academic Scientific Research

Workflow

Use Tavily's MCP tools to search for scholarly sources, extract and verify source content, map or crawl known scholarly sites and collections, and run full literature-review research. Keep this skill focused on research planning, source selection, extraction targets, and evidence synthesis.

Treat the guidance below as base guidance; adapt it to the user's request when appropriate.

• Translate the user's question into search terms, synonyms, key entities, and likely source domains.
• Break broad questions into short subqueries under 400 characters: core concept, synonyms, method names, target population or data, benchmark or dataset, author/lab, and year range.
• Prefer scholarly and official sources when available: preprint servers, PubMed/NIH pages, journals, conference proceedings, professional societies, standards bodies, and official technical reports.
• Extract from the strongest selected pages after screening titles, snippets, source type, recency, and relevance.
• Reserve broad research synthesis for full literature reviews, research landscapes, or multi-method comparisons.
• Distinguish primary studies, review papers, preprints, editorials, guidelines, standards, and news coverage.

Research Budget

• Start with a small focused search set covering the main concept, synonyms, methods, and source type.
• Extract only the strongest scholarly sources before drafting the evidence brief.
• Add more searches only for named gaps, such as missing review papers, missing recent work, or missing primary studies.
• Do not use map unless a known lab, journal, conference, repository, or documentation site has buried pages.
• Do not use crawl unless the user needs broad collection from a known proceedings, publication list, or docs section.

Capability Guidance

• Use search first when the user needs papers, methods, benchmarks, authors, institutions, or recent work.
• Use extract when comparing a small set of papers, reading abstracts, or verifying study claims.
• Use map only when a known lab, journal, conference, repository, or documentation site has useful but hard-to-find pages.
• Use crawl only when the user needs many pages from a known source, such as proceedings, a lab publication list, or a technical docs section.
• Use research only when the user explicitly needs a full literature review or research landscape.

Query And Source Guidance

• Pair formal terms with common synonyms and acronyms.
• Include population, dataset, benchmark, organism, intervention, model, metric, or method terms when relevant.
• For recent literature, include explicit year ranges or recency language in the query.
• Prefer primary literature for claims, review papers for landscape summaries, and guidelines/standards for practice recommendations.
• Deduplicate preprints and final publications; cite the final version when available.
• Treat abstracts, papers, supplemental pages, tables, and official repositories as separate evidence surfaces.
• Report failed or inaccessible sources when they affect key papers, guidelines, datasets, or primary evidence.

Output Template

Use this markdown structure and adapt sections to the user's scope:

# Evidence Brief: <topic>

## Research Question
<brief framing of the question>

## Search Strategy
- Concepts searched:
- Source types prioritized:
- Inclusion logic:
- Exclusions or limitations:

## Key Sources
| Source | Type | Why it matters | URL |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |

## Findings
### <Theme>
- Claim:
- Evidence:
- Limitations:

### <Theme>
- Claim:
- Evidence:
- Limitations:

## Consensus And Disagreement
- Consensus:
- Disagreement:
- Evidence gaps:

## Follow-Up Queries
- <query idea>

For medical, clinical, or biomedical topics, be conservative: do not provide diagnosis or treatment advice, and prioritize primary literature, systematic reviews, guidelines, and official health sources.