Literature Survey Skill

literature-survey-skill

PhD students spend weeks on literature surveys. Most of that time is plumbing — finding papers, extracting claims, cross-referencing terminology, building comparison tables, chasing citation chains. The intellectual work that matters — spotting shared assumptions, finding where they break, recognizing the gap nobody has exploited — takes a fraction of the effort but only happens after the student is already exhausted from logistics.

This skill offloads the plumbing to the machine. NotebookLM ingests your papers and returns grounded extractions with exact quotes. Claude Code manages the workflow — structured queries, template population, reading-depth tracking. You focus on forming hypotheses, deciding what matters, and building the narrative. The skill doesn't just save time; it makes you sharper. Every checkpoint — calibration protocols, WYSIATI checks, first-principles decomposition — forces you to articulate your understanding and confront where it falls short.

**Who this is for:** PhD students and researchers running literature surveys of 10-150+ papers. Tuned for systems and networking (SIGCOMM, NSDI, CoNEXT, IMC) but adaptable to any field — see [Customize for Your Field](#customize-for-your-field).

Built on [Claude Code](https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/claude-code).

Quick Start

git clone https://github.com/SNL-UCSB/literature-survey-skill.git
cd literature-survey-skill
./setup.sh

This installs the skill to `~/.claude/skills/survey/`. Four commands become available:

/survey intent     — Capture your goals, expertise, and survey archetype
/survey triage     — Map the landscape, prioritize reading depth
/survey deepen     — Structured deep reading with craft and visualization extraction
/survey synthesize — Cross-paper analysis for your deliverable
/survey expand     — Propose and evaluate corpus growth

Start with `/survey intent`. The skill guides you from there.

Prerequisites

The [NotebookLM MC