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Literature search — finding the source a citation points at

A node cites a source. Nothing in any declared library holds it. This skill is the step between those two facts and library-ingestion, which takes over once a file exists.

It runs on a measurable trigger, not a feeling: a origin, evidence, source or bibliography reference whose target does not resolve to an entry in any library the instance declares. The methodology graph is where this bites hardest — methodology-adoption requires that an adopted methodology be “external and named”, with “an origin: authors, a publication, a standards body” — and a front-matter string nothing can follow satisfies that requirement only on paper.

Look in this order, and stop at the first hit

1. Memory. The memory graph and agent memory under .claude/agent-memory/. A source located once and found unreachable is worth recording; re-deriving that costs the same search twice and reaches the same wall.

2. This repository. Every declared library and uploads directory, not one of them. An instance may declare several — ask the declaration, do not assume a path. A file sitting in uploads/ is found but not ingested, which is a different finding from not found, and it is the cheapest possible outcome: hand it to library-ingestion and stop.

3. Open-access services. DOI resolution through the publisher, then the open-access aggregators and repositories — Unpaywall, OpenAlex, Crossref, DOAJ, CORE, arXiv, PubMed Central, Zenodo, HAL, and a standards body’s own site where the origin names one. archiving-arxiv and archiving-web-pages cover the fetch once a URL is in hand.

Open access only. What this finds is committed into a library in a public repository, so a paywalled PDF is not a candidate whatever its availability to the person searching. When only a paywalled copy exists, that is an outcome to report (below), not a licence to take it. A publisher’s own free-to-read landing page, a preprint, an author copy in an institutional repository and a standards body’s public specification are all fine.

Always give the direct link

Every outcome carries a direct download link — the URL that yields the file itself, not a search page, not a DOI landing page, not “search for it on X”.

A landing page is acceptable in addition, never instead. The person reading this has limited hand function; “you can find it by searching” converts a finished search into their work, which is the whole thing this skill exists to absorb.

Three outcomes, and the middle one is the point

There are three, not two, and collapsing the middle into the third is the failure this skill is written to prevent.

1. Found and fetched

The file is in uploads/. Hand to library-ingestion and say which service it came from, so the provenance is checkable.

2. Found, but this agent cannot fetch it

The document exists, its location is known, and something in the way this agent is running stopped the transfer — a proxy refusal, a TLS failure, a robots policy, a rate limit, a login wall, a network the container cannot reach.

Report this as a located document, never as a missing one. Say all of:

• what the item IS — full citation: authors, year, title, venue, volume, pages, DOI. Enough that a person recognises it without opening anything.
• what it contains, in a sentence, and its extent if known (pages, format). This is what lets the person judge whether it is worth their trouble.
• the direct download link, as above.
• why the fetch failed, in plain words — “the agent proxy returned 403”, “the publisher requires a login”, “the host is not reachable from this container”. Not “could not retrieve”.
• what to do with it: drop the file into uploads/ and the ingest runs.

Then record it in the work plan as blocked on a fetch, with what it waits on — bean-blocking’s rules apply, expiry included.

A network restriction is a fact about this agent, not about the literature. Reported as “not found” it becomes a fact about the world, and the next agent re-runs the identical search, hits the identical wall, and reports the identical wrong conclusion. Worse, a methodology whose source was found and blocked reads exactly like one whose source does not exist, and the first is a five-minute human action while the second may mean the methodology should not have been adopted.

3. Not found

Nothing open-access resolves to it. Say what was searched — the services, not “a search was done” — and what the closest candidates were and why each was rejected. A rejected candidate with no record is a dead end the next agent walks back into, which is bean-coordination’s argument for scrapped over deleted, applied to a search.

“Not found” for a source that is merely paywalled is wrong. That is outcome 2 with “the only copies are behind a paywall” as the reason.

Never fill the gap with recall

Do not paraphrase, summarise, quote or characterise a source you have not opened. Not from training, not from a secondary source, not from an abstract read in a search result, unless the abstract is what you say you read.

This is the rule the whole evidence base rests on. A methodology file that renders a method from the agent’s recollection and cites a paper nobody fetched is worse than one with no citation at all: it carries the authority of a reference while resting on nothing, and there is no way for a reader to tell it apart from a faithful rendering.

Where a source is read through another — a review paper reporting a primary one — say so at each claim. methodologies/swot.md is the worked example: Humphrey, Weihrich, Dealtry, Wheelen & Hunger, Hill & Westbrook, Mintzberg and Dess et al. are all read through one review, every attribution is marked second-hand, and the file says the origin of the method is contested rather than repeating the usual story as fact.

What this skill does NOT do

• It does not appraise. Certainty of a body of evidence is evidence-appraisal against the grading system the folio declares, and for a health recommendation that is grade. Finding a paper says nothing about whether it is any good.
• It does not ingest. library-ingestion owns uploads/ → library/, and the ingest chooses its own rung.
• It does not decide which methodology to use. That is methodology-adoption, which this skill feeds: the evidence behind a methodology is an input to selecting it.
• It does not judge whether a gap matters. It reports the gap. Whether a methodology with no reachable source should still be adopted is the owner’s call, and deletion-requires-confirmation’s posture applies — report, with what is missing, and wait.

Related

• library-ingestion — the next step, once a file exists
• methodology-adoption — what requires an origin in the first place, and the selection question this feeds
• evidence-appraisal — appraising what was found
• evidence-review — separation of appraiser from drafter
• bean-blocking — recording outcome 2 so it does not read as abandoned

Processes that run this skill

process	step(s) that name it
Options analysis	Check the selected methodology’s evidence base