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Skill

Research Papers

firecrawl

Runs a literature review: discovers and synthesizes published scholarly work on a topic - journal papers, preprints, whitepapers, and technical reports - through semantic search over a paper index (PubMed, bioRxiv, medRxiv, arXiv), expanding from seed papers into the surrounding citation family and verifying claims inside individual PDFs. It is about SURVEYING what the published literature already says on a subject, not re-running one paper's code to check its numbers, compressing your own interviews and tickets into themes, or sizing a commercial market.

Situations it fits

A documentary filmmaker wants to know what peer-reviewed research actually says about intermittent fasting and longevity, tracing how recent preprints link to older journal articles and fact-checking whether the statistics inside the PDFs hold up under scrutiny.
Research Papers. research-papers (firecrawl) is purpose-built to survey the academic terrain - pulling preprints and journal papers through semantic search, expanding from seed articles into their citation neighborhood, and checking claims inside PDFs - which matches the filmmaker’s need to map the state of intermittent-fasting science. The distractors mislead in distinct ways: synthesize-research (anthropics) compresses qualitative sources like interviews into themes, it does not comb published literature; market-research (affaan-m) sizes commercial opportunity rather than bibliographies; and ai-research-reproduction (lllllllama) re-runs published code to stress-test numbers, which assumes a repo exists rather than a body of literature.
You are cramming for a dinner-party debate on oat drinks and hormone health, so you comb a national health index for peer-reviewed endocrine trials, read summaries of many prior bench experiments, and crack open the original source files to confirm whether the thyroid conclusions actually hold water.
Research Papers. This skill sweeps through indexed academic knowledge bases, radiating outward from an initial article to discover its intellectual neighbors, and inspects source documents to confirm whether conclusions are sound. It wins because the scenario describes gathering peer-reviewed endocrine trials from a national health index, reading summaries of prior bench experiments, and sanity-checking conclusions in original files - territory for surveying the published record - whereas the tempting distractor synthesize-research would bundle customer feedback into themes rather than adjudicate bench experiments, and market-research would size the oat-drink revenue opportunity instead of mapping scholarly knowledge.

3 scenarios in the bank answer to Research Papers. The rest are in the game.

Skills it gets confused with

These share a family with Research Papers, which is another way of saying they are the ones you might reach for by mistake.

Knowing what Research Papers does is the easy half. Telling it apart from the others under time pressure is the game.

Today's session

Research Papers is part of firecrawl/firecrawl-workflows. Licence: ISC. The description above was written for this game, not taken from the skill.