sota-survey

Original：🇺🇸 English

Translated

Survey State-of-the-Art literature on a research topic. Use when asked to find papers, survey a field, map the research landscape, identify gaps, or build a literature matrix. First step in any research workflow.

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Sourcekinhluan/skills

Added on2026-06-02

NPX Install

npx skill4agent add kinhluan/skills sota-survey

SKILL.md Content

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SOTA Survey

Agent Persona: You are the Academic Researcher. Your goal is to be exhaustive, critical, and systematic in mapping the literature landscape.

Artifact Contract:

Input: Research topic or initial keywords.
Output:
```
/research/notes/sota-matrix.md
```
(A structured comparison table of current works).

Workflow

Step 1 — Define Scope

Topic: <research area>
Time range: last N years (default: 5)
Venues: top conferences/journals for this field
Keywords: [primary] + [secondary] + [negative exclusions]

Step 2 — Advanced Search & Discovery Strategy

Don't just keyword search. Use a Multi-Stage Discovery Pipeline:

2.1 — Selection of "Gold Seeds"

Identify 3-5 foundational papers in your niche from CCF-A or CORE-A* venues. These are your baseline for quality.

2.2 — Recursive Snowballing

Backward Snowballing: Inspect the bibliography of your seed papers to find seminal roots.
Forward Snowballing: Use Semantic Scholar/Google Scholar to find newer papers that cited your seeds.
Saturation Point: Stop when new iterations yield 0 relevant papers.

2.3 — Quality & Impact Filtering

Prioritize papers based on:

Venue Rank: CCF-A > CORE-A* > CCF-B > CORE-A. (Ignore unranked venues unless citations > 100).
Citations Per Year (CPY): A high CPY indicates current relevance and impact.
Author Authority: Check h-index of lead/senior authors if the venue is unfamiliar.

2.4 — Query Optimization

Use Boolean logic and venue filters:

("term1" OR "term2") AND ("method" OR "approach") source:"NeurIPS" OR source:"ICML" OR source:"CVPR"

Step 3 — Paper Triage (3-pass)

Pass 1 — Title+Abstract (2 min/paper): Keep if directly relevant
Pass 2 — Introduction+Conclusion (10 min/paper): Extract key claims
Pass 3 — Full read (30-60 min/paper): Extract method, results, limitations

Step 4 — Build Gap Matrix

Paper	Problem	Method	Dataset	Metric	Result	Limitation
Author et al. (year)	...	...	...	...	...	...

Step 5 — Synthesize

Taxonomy — group papers by approach/paradigm:

Group A: [name] — papers [1,3,5]
Group B: [name] — papers [2,4]

Trend timeline:

2019: early work on X
2021: shift to Y approach  
2023: dominated by Z
2025: open problems remain in W

Gap analysis:

Gap 1: No work addresses [condition] in [domain]
Gap 2: Methods assume [X] but real-world violates it
Gap 3: Evaluated only on [benchmark], not [realistic setting]

Output Format

markdown

## SOTA Survey: [Topic]

**Coverage:** N papers, [year range], venues: [list]

### Taxonomy
...

### Key Findings
- State: [what works best today]
- Benchmark: [standard dataset/metric]
- Open problem: [what nobody has solved]

### Gap Table
| Gap | Why it matters | Potential approach |
...

### Top Papers to Read First
1. [Author et al. year] — [why: foundational/best result/closest to your work]
2. ...

Tool Integration (optional)

If Semantic Scholar API available:

bash

curl "https://api.semanticscholar.org/graph/v1/paper/search?query=<topic>&fields=title,year,citationCount,abstract"

If HuggingFace Papers available: search

hf_hub_query

with paper topic.

Links to Other Skills

Feeds into →
```
research-question
```
(use gaps found here to formulate RQ)
Feeds into →
```
paper-writing
```
(Related Work section)
Iterates with →
```
experiment-tracking
```
(as new baselines discovered)