Research Decision Skill — Evidence-Based STEM Decisions

Make evidence-backed research decisions when choosing a research direction, comparing alternatives, evaluating an idea, or deciding what experiment to run next.

Use it when you need to

• Choose a research question and narrow a claim to something testable.
• Compare methods or competing hypotheses against your goals, evidence, and constraints.
• Design the next experiment, proof, or discriminating test.
• Interpret failed, anomalous, or unstable results and decide whether to continue, pivot, or stop.

What you get

A concise decision card: a conditional recommendation, the key reasons and source links, one next action, and the evidence that would change the recommendation. Ask for a deeper explanation, an alternatives comparison, or an audit record when useful.

The skill uses a nonlinear map of 29 research decisions, selects the relevant STEM discipline pack, and searches for current public expert reasoning. It checks how sources apply to your situation and can defer judgment when evidence is insufficient. Project files can preserve the reasoning and evidence across research sessions.

Who it is for

Scientists, engineers, and STEM students working in AI/ML, mathematics and statistics, computer science, physics and astronomy, chemistry and materials, engineering, life sciences research, earth and environmental sciences, or interdisciplinary STEM research.

Getting started

Install the complete ZIP in a compatible agent. Share your research goal, work completed, current results, unresolved decision, and constraints. Codex installation and usage instructions are maintained in the GitHub repository.

Free, open source, and attributed

Created by Odyphus. This listing distributes the public 0.5.0-preview package for free. GitHub is the canonical source for code, documentation, updates, and issues: github.com/Odyphus/research-decision-skill.

Original code and wording are licensed under Apache-2.0. The ZIP preserves LICENSE, NOTICE, CITATION.cff, LICENSE_AND_ATTRIBUTION.md, and THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md. The decision map draws on Price et al. (2021), DOI 10.1187/cbe.20-12-0276. Their article and supplement are not bundled or relicensed; this is an independent product adaptation.

This is a public-source decision-support Preview. Human domain-expert validation and durable learning-transfer effectiveness have not been demonstrated.