Literature Review

The literature review workflow produces a structured survey of the academic landscape on a given topic. Unlike deep research which aims for a comprehensive brief, the literature review focuses specifically on mapping the state of the field — what researchers agree on, where they disagree, and what remains unexplored. When the input names a lab, PI, author, or lab website, /lit switches into publication-corpus mode: it resolves the lab or author identity, collects reachable publications, maps topic trajectories, and ranks the papers that most changed the corpus direction.

Usage

From the REPL:

/lit Scaling laws for language model performance

From the CLI:

feynman lit "Scaling laws for language model performance"
feynman lit "Anthropic interpretability team"

How it works

The literature review workflow begins by searching for papers on the topic across AlphaXiv and the web. For a lab/PI input, the lead agent first resolves the lab or author identity and writes a reachable publication log before any delegated synthesis. The workflow prioritizes survey papers, foundational work, recent publications, and stable source URLs to capture both established knowledge and the current frontier.

After gathering sources, the agents extract claims, results, and methodology from each paper. The synthesis step then organizes findings into a structured review that maps out where the community has reached consensus, where active debate exists, and where gaps in the literature remain.

The output is organized chronologically and thematically, showing how ideas evolved over time and how different research groups approach the problem differently. For publication-corpus reviews, the output also names 3-5 research trajectories and ranks 3-5 papers by contrastive originality, methodology strength, and relationship to prior art. Citation counts and publication venues are used as signals for weighting claims, though the review explicitly notes when influential work contradicts the mainstream view.

Output format

The literature review produces:

  • Scope and Methodology — What was searched and how papers were selected
  • Consensus — Claims that most papers agree on, with supporting citations
  • Disagreements — Active debates where papers present conflicting evidence or interpretations
  • Open Questions — Topics that the literature has not adequately addressed
  • Timeline — Key milestones and how the field evolved
  • Publication Trajectories — For lab/PI inputs, reachable corpus coverage plus topic trajectories and originality-ranked papers
  • References — Complete bibliography organized by relevance

When to use it

Use /lit when you need a map of the research landscape rather than a deep dive into a specific question. It is particularly useful at the start of a new research project when you need to understand what has already been done, or when preparing a related work section for a paper.

For biomedical and clinical research topics, see Biomedical Literature Review for research-only framing, evidence-type separation, and privacy boundaries.