Research Corpus Review

• Open the relevant source landing pages and identify where the corpus actually lives.
• Confirm how listing pages, pagination, issue pages, session pages, abstract pages, PDFs, and external links are structured.
• Decide whether direct browsing is sufficient or whether you need a site-specific script to build the manifest.
• Read site-inspection-and-manifest.md.

3. Build and freeze the manifest before scoring relevance.

• Create a manifest artifact in the task workspace. Use CSV or JSON for large corpora; use a Markdown table only for small corpora.
• Give each paper one stable row and one stable identifier.
• Record the target corpus size and reconcile it against the collected manifest before reading for relevance.
• Do not start ranking until the manifest is frozen.

4. Read every manifest entry and assign a structured result.

• Perform a first pass over every row: title, abstract, keywords, and any concise metadata needed to disambiguate the paper.
• Perform a second pass for high-signal or uncertain rows: introduction, conclusion, figures, and tables as needed.
• Perform a deeper read only for the top bucket or when the user asks for it.
• Read reading-and-ranking.md.

5. Use sub-agents only after the manifest exists.

• Keep corpus definition, manifest generation, sharding, merge, and final reconciliation with the main agent.
• Assign sub-agents disjoint manifest shards with fixed output fields.
• Require one result per assigned manifest row. Missing fetches must be marked explicitly, not dropped.
• Read subagent-protocol.md.

6. Reconcile coverage before claiming completion.

• Confirm that every manifest row is in a terminal state.
• Confirm that the terminal-state counts add back up to the manifest size.
• Call out duplicates, fetch failures, and unresolved rows explicitly.
• Read reporting-and-reconciliation.md.

7. Report the ranked outcome and the coverage proof together.

• Return the corpus definition, manifest size, coverage summary, ranked list, deeper-read candidates, and any unresolved gaps.
• Do not return only the top papers; include enough audit detail to prove nothing relevant was silently skipped.

Operating Rules

• Freeze the corpus boundary early. Do not change the sources, year range, or inclusion rules mid-review without stating the change.
• Treat coverage as a first-class requirement. No coverage proof means the review is incomplete.
• Use the browser to understand the corpus structure; use scripts to mechanize repeated, low-judgment collection steps.
• When interactive browser exploration stabilizes into repeated collection steps, save the final automation code in the task workspace and record how to rerun it.
• Do not let scripts decide semantic relevance from token overlap alone.
• Escalate uncertain boundary cases into an explicit bucket instead of forcing false precision.
• Prefer a small number of durable artifacts over chat-only reasoning. The plan, manifest, and reconciliation summary are part of the deliverable.

Read These References When Needed

• review-plan.md: planning template and completion contract
• site-inspection-and-manifest.md: inspect-first workflow, manifest schema, and automation boundary
• reading-and-ranking.md: reading depth, scoring rubric, and edge-case handling
• subagent-protocol.md: sharding rules, required output fields, and merge constraints
• reporting-and-reconciliation.md: terminal states, count checks, and final report schema