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Research

When to use it
Take a question from vague to answered: plan the research around the decision it serves, synthesise the sources with every claim cited, and rank rival explanations by the evidence against them.
Covers
Research a question (3)
Where you decide
  • G7 review — research → compare
Size
8 skills · 1 loop · 1 gate, 1 needs a person
An hour to plan and an hour to synthesise, plus however long the research takes a session
npx skilldrop-cli install --pack research

Installs 8 skills, including core.

Other ways to install

The pack's loops too, each as an invokable skill:

npx skilldrop-cli install --loop --pack research

In Claude Code, as a plugin (after /plugin marketplace add sananthanarayan/skilldrop):

/plugin install research@skilldrop

Into Cursor, Kiro or another IDE:

npx skilldrop-cli install --pack research --ide cursor

Start here: Turn a vague research request into a plan you can finish

Paste this into your agent:

I need to research whether our 14-person support team should move to a four-day week. Our COO decides by 1 November. I have about 20 hours and can pull ticket data from Zendesk.
Before you start
  • A question you need answered and the decision it feeds; for synthesis, the text of your sources, not just titles
How to tell it worked
research-plan writes a plan that opens with the decision, the decider and the date, then gives three to six sub-questions, each with a finding that would change the decision, a method, search strings, and a stopping rule with a budget cap.
If nothing happens
If you get a plan built around a decision you didn't give, say who decides what and by when, and run it again. If research-plan does not activate, ask for it by name ("use research-plan").

A typical session

When: You've been asked to look into something before a decision, and you need an answer you can defend, with sources. About An hour to plan and an hour to synthesise, plus however long the research takes.

You bring:

  1. research-plan
    You
    Say what decision the research is for, then give it the topic and your time budget.
    You get
    A two-page plan: the precise question, sub-questions with the finding that would change the decision, a method for each, inclusion criteria, search strings, and a stopping rule.
    You decide
    Agree the thresholds before you start, so the findings can't be read to fit.
  2. source-synthesis
    You
    Hand it the sources you collected, as text, with the plan's question.
    You get
    What the sources support on the question, each claim traceable to its source, with disagreements and echoes made explicit, the sources' own sums checked, labelled estimates where a figure is needed, and the gaps. Ask for a cited literature review to get page-level citations and strength ratings.
  3. hypothesis-comparison
    You
    If the question is why something happened, give it the observation and the cited findings.
    You get
    A consistency matrix ranking the explanations by the evidence against them, the evidence the ranking rests on, and the next observation that would tell the leaders apart.
    You decide
    Act on the leading explanation, or run the next observation first.

You end with: A decision-led plan, a synthesis that keeps what the sources say apart from everything else, and, for why-questions, a ranked set of explanations with the next test to run.

Loops

Compare Research with another pack

Skills in this pack (3)

Included from core (5)