literature review builder

The problem

Synthesizing academic research is prone to citation hallucination and disorganized tracking. Manually extracting methodology, findings, and journal rankings across dozens of PDFs is slow and error-prone.

What it does

• Reads and screens uploaded PDFs, folder paths, or bibliography exports against specific research questions.
• Extracts structured data including methodology, key findings, stated limitations, and journal quartiles.
• Enforces an anti-fabrication gate to ensure every citation and claim is traceable to source text read in the current session.
• Generates a compact Excel workbook with a screening log, theme synthesis, and research gap analysis.

Why this beats prompting it yourself

Generic prompts often hallucinate plausible-sounding but non-existent citations. This skill uses a strict verification gate and dedicated extraction logic to ensure data integrity and professional spreadsheet formatting that standard LLM outputs lack.

Use cases

• Building the "Related Work" or background section for a thesis or dissertation.
• Conducting a systematic screening of a literature folder to identify research gaps.
• Performing rapid due diligence on the "state of the art" for grant applications.
• Organizing a bibliography by themes and journal impact for publication planning.

Known limitations

Cannot access JavaScript-heavy or login-protected databases like Scopus or Google Scholar directly. Full-text fetches are capped at 12 sources per session to maintain performance.