What’s inside

One SKILL.md (the playbook) + one starter template. A preview:

Skills for Researchers

When to use

• Your literature review is a folder of PDFs with filenames like "final_v3_REAL.pdf" and no record of what you kept or why
• Analysis decisions live in your head — which exclusions, which model, which sensitivity checks — so nobody, including future you, can reproduce them
• Figures get remade for every draft because the numbers behind them were never pinned down
• You want one kit that covers a whole study — question, literature, analysis, figures, write-up, reproducibility — to a single standard
• You're collaborating or supervising and need the study's methods written down so someone else can check or extend them

Workflow

1. Audit a real study (input: one study you ran or are running → output: study inventory)
   Pick a study you actually worked on and lay out everything it involved: the research question, search strategy, screened papers, extraction sheet, analysis code or steps, figures, drafts, and whatever reproducibility record exists (if any). Note where the study wobbled — papers re-screened because inclusion criteria were never written down, analyses rerun because an exclusion wasn't logged, a figure whose numbers nobody can regenerate. The audit decides what the kit must contain; a kit built for an ideal lab gets abandoned at the first deadline.
2. Scope the kit around the evidence chain (input: study inventory → output: kit scope)
   A researcher's kit has one spine: question → literature → analysis → figures → write-up → reproducibility, where every later link must be traceable to the earlier ones. Scope ten skills around that spine: research question framer, search strategy builder, inclusion/exclusion screener, extraction sheet designer, analysis planner, figure maker, results writer, methods writer, reproducibility checker, and peer-review responder. Each skill owns exactly one artifact. Anything outside the chain — citation-count chasing, journal targeting — is a distraction; cut it. A kit that produces a polished write-up nobody can trace back to its data is a kit that manufactures doubt.
3. Set the quality bar (input: kit scope → output: quality standard)
   Every skill in the kit must meet the same bar: every inclusion or exclusion decision cites the criterion it applied; every analysis choice names the alternative and why it was rejected; every figure states its data source, sample size, and what the reader should conclude; every methods paragraph is detailed enough that a competent peer could repeat the step. Write the bar as a checklist and run each skill's first output through it. A kit where the write-up is elegant and the analysis log is empty will not survive review — and shouldn't.

Template preview

Skills for Researchers — Kit Template

One kit = ten skills along the evidence chain. Fill this in from one real study, then build in study order.

1. Study inventory (one study you ran or are running)

Study: {title / question} | Design: {e.g. systematic review / experiment / survey / qualitative}

Wobble found: {e.g. papers re-screened — criteria never written down; figure numbers unregenerable}

2. Kit scope (ten skills, one artifact each)

Cut list (outside the chain): {e.g. citation-count chasing, journal targeting}

3. Quality standard (checklist — every skill's output must pass)

Buy the full skill pack — $4.99 Pro — all 471 skills