Literature Review — independently scanned and version-tracked by SaferSkills.
SaferSkills independently audited Literature Review (Agent Skill) and scored it 100/100 (green). The audit ran 55 deterministic rules across Security, Supply Chain, Maintenance, Transparency, and Community; it found 0 high-severity and 0 lower-severity findings. The full rule-by-rule trace and per-finding evidence are below. Free, methodology-open.
Findings & checks · 0 flagged
Every scanned point with the score it earned and what moved between them.
First recorded scan — no prior version to compare against.
The primary manifest — the file an agent reads to learn what this artifact does.
A literature review is an argument about the state of knowledge, not a list of summaries. The failure it prevents is the annotated bibliography in disguise - one paragraph per paper, no comparison, no position - which readers skip and reviewers reject because it demonstrates reading, not understanding. Every section must compare works against each other and end somewhere: a consensus, a live dispute, or a gap.
Collect before writing:
Label assumed scope as a guess and confirm.
Define the question, rough inclusion criteria, and timeframe. Prioritize two classes of work: seminal papers (highly cited, field-defining - the ones later work argues with) and recent work (the current frontier). A review citing only old classics is stale; only recent preprints, rootless. Snowball: mine reference lists of the 3-5 most central papers backward, and their citing papers forward.
For each work record: the central claim, the method, sample or setting, the key limitation, and which conversation it joins. One or two sentences per field. This table is what makes Step 4 possible - grouping requires comparable atoms.
Group works by approach, finding, or dispute - not chronologically and not paper-by-paper. A theme is a sentence, not a topic word. Bad theme: "Remote work studies." Good theme: "Remote work raises measured output but weakens team cohesion, with the effect moderated by tenure." Aim for 3-6 themes; more than that means the question is too broad or the themes are actually sub-points.
For every theme, state three things explicitly:
Contrast pair for the synthesis sentence:
Bad: "Smith (2019) found X. Jones (2021) found Y. Lee (2022) also studied this topic."
Good: "Field experiments consistently find X (Smith; Lee), but survey-based studies find the opposite (Jones) - plausibly because self-report captures intention rather than behavior, a gap no study has yet tested directly."
The gap is the point of the review. State explicitly: questions no work answers, populations or contexts not studied, methods not yet applied, and claims everyone repeats on thin evidence. If the review supports the user's own research, the gap must lead directly to their question - that alignment is the whole rhetorical job of a related-work section.
Every cited claim must trace to a real, checkable source. Never fabricate or guess citations; flag anything unverifiable. For formatting and DOI verification of the final reference list, hand off to citation-tracker.
Produce a review containing: thematic sections that compare and contrast works, an explicit consensus/dispute/quality assessment per theme, a synthesis that takes a position on where the field stands, an explicit "gaps and future directions" section, and accurate citations throughout.
~30 seconds. Free. No account. Every finding cites a rule and a line of evidence.