Introducing Skills: Research on Repeat

A literature review takes more than finding a few good papers. You search, read, follow citations, and search again as your question gets clearer. When you start writing, there’s another round of work: finding sources for the claims you’ve left in brackets and checking the citations you’ve already added.

Even with a clear plan, carrying out those steps takes time.

Today we’re introducing Skills: ready-to-run workflows for common research tasks. Choose a skill from the query box and give it a question, a starting paper, or a section of your draft. Consensus searches and reads the relevant research from its corpus of 220M+ peer-reviewed papers, then returns its findings with the papers and passages behind them.

Skills run in Deep, Consensus’s mode for multi-step research. You choose the task without having to write a detailed prompt for every step.

Review, Trace, Cite, Verify

We’re launching with four skills:

Literature Review: Start with a research question and get a structured overview. Consensus runs up to 20 searches in parallel, reads up to 100 papers, and follows their citations to build the review.

Citation Snowballing: Provide a starting paper and explore the work around it: the papers it references and the newer papers that cite it. Use it to expand your reading list or follow how a line of research has developed.

Reverse Citation Search: Give it a claim that needs a source. It finds relevant research so you can assess whether the evidence supports the sentence, needs a qualification, or points in a different direction.

Verify Citations: Provide a section of your draft with its citations. It checks whether each source supports the claim it’s attached to, contradicts it, or doesn’t address it, and shows the passage behind the assessment.

Skills in Practice

1. Writing and Checking a Discussion Section

You’ve typed “mindfulness-based interventions reduce burnout in medical residents,” and you’re fairly sure you read that somewhere.

Find sources with Reverse Citation Search. Give it that sentence. The research behind it is mixed: a 2021 meta-analysis of 25 studies finds small reductions in physician burnout, and one randomized trial of a tailored program found an effect. But a 340-intern cluster trial in JAMA Pediatrics and a 148-resident MBSR trial found no significant change in emotional exhaustion. You may need to narrow the claim to reflect the population, intervention, and outcome studied.

Check the revised section with Verify Citations. Once you’ve added your sources, provide the section and ask it to check each citation. For example, if you’ve cited the 148-resident trial as evidence that MBSR reduced emotional exhaustion, that’s a mismatch to look for: the trial found no significant difference on that outcome. Read the supporting passage, then revise the sentence or choose a more appropriate source.

2. Building a Reading List in an Unfamiliar Field

Suppose you’re starting a project on spaced practice and long-term learning.

Get an overview with Literature Review. Choose the skill and ask: “How does spaced practice affect long-term retention in university students?” Use the overview to identify relevant studies and compare their populations, practice schedules, and measures of retention. Note questions you want to investigate further rather than treating anything absent from the review as an established research gap.

Follow a paper with Citation Snowballing. Choose a relevant review or study from the results and provide it as the starting paper. Ask the skill to find the earlier work it draws on and the newer studies that cite it. That gives you a connected set of papers to read next, including follow-up work you can check for extensions, replications, or conflicting findings.

Checking the Work

Skills help with searching, following citations, and looking up the evidence behind a claim. The papers and passages returned with the Literature Review results give you a starting point for checking their work. You still need to decide whether a study is relevant, whether its methods are sound, and how much weight its findings deserve.

A “doesn’t support” verdict from the Verify Citations skill is a reason to read the passage, not a ruling. Start with a section rather than a whole manuscript for Verify Citations, and have a seed paper ready for Citation Snowballing.

Try a Skill

Open Consensus, choose Skills in the query box, and select the task you’re working on. Add your question, starting paper, or draft section to get started.