/research-ideation

name: research-ideation
description: "End-to-end research ideation pipeline: literature grounding → multi-track idea generation (3 personas: innovator/pragmatist/critic) → iterative refinement → ELO tournament ranking → update evo-memory (IDE) → user selects direction → expand into manuscript-quality proposal. Use when: user wants to find a research direction, brainstorm ideas, evaluate idea novelty, design a novel solution, rank/compare research ideas, or generate a research proposal. Do NOT use for finding/searching/reading papers (use paper-navigator), literature survey reports (use research-survey), or planning a paper (use paper-planning)."
allowed-tools: "write_file edit_file read_file think_tool execute"
metadata:
  author: EvoScientist
  version: '2.1.0'
  tags: [core, research, ideation, tournament, proposal]

Research Ideation

From research goal to ranked ideas and a detailed proposal.

Step 0: Load evo-memory (M_I)
    ↓
Step 1: Define Goal
    ↓
Step 2: Literature Grounding (MUST use paper-navigator scripts)
    ↓
Step 3: Generate Ideas (3 directions × 3 personas)
    ↓
Step 4: Refine Ideas (3 tracks × N iterations)
    ↓
Step 5: ELO Tournament → Present Top-3 to User
    ↓
Step 6: Update evo-memory (IDE)
    ↓
User Selects
    ↓
Step 7: Expand into Proposal
    ↓
Step 8: Validate and Iterate

When to Use

• User wants to find a research direction or brainstorm research ideas
• User wants to evaluate whether an idea is novel or worth pursuing
• User wants to rank or compare multiple research ideas
• User wants to generate a research proposal from an idea

When NOT to Use

• **Finding/reading papers** → use `paper-navigator`
• **Literature survey report** → use `research-survey`
• **Planning a paper (story design, experiment plan)** → use `paper-planning`

---

Step 0: Load Prior Knowledge from evo-memory

**Before any ideation begins**, load Ideation Memory (M_I) from prior research cycles:

1. Read M_I at `/memory/ideation-memory.md` (refer to `evo-memory` skill) 2. Select the **top-2 entries** (k_I=2) most relevant to the user's current goal by comparing each entry's Summary and Retrieval Tags against the goal 3. **Feasible directions** from prior cycles → use as seeds in Step 3 (incorporate as candidate research directions alongside new ones) 4. **Unsuccessful directions** marked as fundamental failures → use during idea pruning in Step 4 (prune any idea that matches a fundamental failure pattern) 5. If M_I doesn't exist yet (first cycle), skip this step

This step prevents repeating known dead ends and builds on prior successes across research cycles.

Step 1: Define a Long-Term Research Goal

Start with a goal that has both scientific and practical value. Ambitious enough for multiple papers, concrete enough to guide daily decisions.

Ask: "What is the ultimate form of this research direction? What would the world look like if this problem were fully solved?"

Step 2: Literature Grounding (via paper-navigator)

**Invoke `paper-navigator`** (Workflow 9: Ideation Support) to collect 30-50 relevant papers. Do NOT skip this step or substitute with general knowledge — ideas must be grounded in real papers.

**CRITICAL: All paper discovery in this step MUST use the `paper-navigator` skill and its scripts (scholar_search, citation_traverse, arxiv_monitor, recommend, etc.). Using WebSearch, WebFetch, or any generic web search tool for finding papers is PROHIBITED.** Generic web search returns blog posts, news articles, and low-quality results — only paper-navigator provides access to Semantic Scholar, arXiv, citation graph traversal, and academic recommendations needed for rigorous literature grounding.

Build Challenge-Insight Tree

From the collected papers, construct a **challenge-insight tree** — a many-to-many mapping between technical challenges and the insights/techniques that address them:

• **Extract challenges**: From each paper, what technical problem does it solve?
• **Extract insights**: What technique or key idea does it use?
• **Map connections**: Which insights address which challenges?

**How this drives ideation**:

• Challenges with few insights → **unsolved problem** (candidate for Step 3)
• Insights not yet applied to a challenge → **cross-domain transfer opportunity** (candidate for Step 4)
• Challenges with many insights → well-studied, avoid unless you have a fundamentally new angle

Also generate a condensed **literature review synthesis** as context for idea generation (for full surveys use `research-survey`).

See `references/literature-tree.md` for construction methodology.

**Execution rule**: Do NOT generate ideas without real paper grounding. The tree must reference actual papers with titles, authors, and findings. Paper search MUST go through `paper-navigator` — never use WebSearch/WebFetch as a shortcut.

Step 3: Generate Ideas

Generate 3 initial research ideas from 3 distinct research directions, grounded in the literature.

Three Personas

| Persona | Focus | |---------|-------| | **Innovator** | Novelty & creativity — groundbreaking, high-risk/high-reward | | **Pragmatist** | Feasibility — realistic, clearly executable | | **Critic** | Scientific value — advances understanding, rigorous |

Process

1. Analyze literature + challenge-insight tree → identify 3 fundamentally different research directions 2. Generate one idea per direction using **Innovator** persona 3. Each idea must follow one of two methodological paths:

• **Path 1 (Focused Contribution)**: Single new component; clean hypothesis
• **Path 2 (System Contribution)**: Tight causal interaction between components; emergent capability

Idea Format

# Research Idea: [Concise Title]

## Core Idea
[One paragraph: the proposal + which research direction it addresses]

## Validation Plan
[Concrete experiment outline: datasets, baselines, metrics]

Step 4: Refine Ideas

Run 3 parallel refinement tracks — one per initial i