Research Framework

You're doing academic or technical research. Finding papers manually is slow. Tracking what you've read and what it says is a spreadsheet nightmare. When you cite something, you're never sure you're representing the source correctly.

The research framework automates the mechanical parts — discovery, acquisition, summarization, citation management, quality assessment — while keeping you in control of interpretation and synthesis. It prevents hallucinated citations by grounding everything against actual source content.

Deploy it

npm install -g aiwg
cd /path/to/your/research-project
aiwg use research
claude .

The research workflow

discover → acquire → document → cite → assess quality → synthesize → find gaps → archive

Each stage has dedicated commands. Run them in sequence or jump to wherever you are.

Finding papers

/research-discover "transformer attention mechanisms" --limit 20

Searches academic databases using semantic search, ranks results by relevance and quality, and returns a prioritized list. The `discovery-agent` detects gaps in your existing corpus and surfaces papers you likely haven't seen.

Filter by recency, citation count, or open access:

/research-discover "RLHF alignment techniques" --year-min 2023 --open-access-only

Acquiring papers

/research-acquire --from-results last --output papers/

Downloads PDFs with Unpaywall integration for open-access versions. Extracts metadata, validates against FAIR principles, and assigns persistent `REF-XXX` identifiers to every paper. You always know how to refer back to a source.

Documenting papers

/research-document papers/attention-is-all-you-need.pdf

Uses RAG-based summarization against the actual PDF content — not from training data. Produces a structured literature note with:

Key findings and contributions
Methodology summary
Limitations acknowledged by the authors
Connections to other papers in your corpus
GRADE quality assessment

This is the core anti-hallucination mechanism. Every claim in the note is grounded against the source text.

Citation management

/research-cite REF-042 --style apa

Generates properly formatted citations in 9,000+ styles from stored metadata. No manual formatting.

Check all citations in a document for accuracy:

/verify-citations path/to/paper.md

Flags any citation that doesn't match the actual source content in your corpus. Catches misquotes, misattributions, and fabricated page numbers.

Quality assessment

Every paper gets a GRADE score (Grading of Recommendations, Assessment, Development and Evaluations):

High: Systematic reviews, RCTs, large cohort studies
Moderate: Smaller controlled studies, consistent observational evidence
Low: Case reports, expert opinion, early-stage findings

/quality-assess REF-042

When you cite low-quality sources, the framework flags it and suggests appropriate hedging language. You can still use the source — you just do it honestly.

Corpus health

/research-status

Shows corpus statistics: total papers, quality distribution, coverage by topic, papers with incomplete metadata, and citations that need verification. The `corpus-health` skill gives you a snapshot of where your research stands.

Finding gaps

/research-gap "transformer fine-tuning approaches"

Analyzes your corpus against the query topic to identify what's missing — research questions that aren't answered by what you have, contradictions between sources that need resolution, and time periods with thin coverage.

Synthesizing knowledge

/research-document --synthesize "attention mechanisms"

Produces a synthesis note connecting related papers in your corpus — agreements, contradictions, evolution of the idea over time. This is where individual literature notes become connected knowledge.

Archiving the corpus

/research-archive --verify-integrity

Packages the research corpus following OAIS standards: SHA-256 integrity verification, provenance tracking for all derivations, version control for notes, and reproducibility validation so anyone can reconstruct your research process.

Key references

`/corpus-health` — Corpus health report
`/research-status` — Full research status dashboard
`/grade-report` — GRADE quality distribution across corpus
`@agentic/code/frameworks/research-complete/README.md` — Full framework documentation