Research Question Refiner

What's Known:

• What's the current state-of-the-art?
• What are the established approaches?
• What have people tried that didn't work?

What's Unknown:

• What are the acknowledged open problems?
• What assumptions does current work make?
• Where do methods fail?

What's Controversial:

• Where do researchers disagree?
• What's claimed but not convincingly shown?
• What's believed but not rigorously tested?

Output: A structured map with citations/references for each area.

Stage 3: Find the Gap

A good research question lives in a gap that is:

Gap-finding questions:

• What would change if we relaxed assumption X?
• What if we applied method A to domain B?
• What's between approach X and approach Y?
• What fails in setting Z that works elsewhere?

Output: 3-5 candidate gaps, each as one sentence.

Stage 4: Refine to Concrete Question

For each candidate gap, sharpen into a question:

The Formula:

[Action verb] + [specific phenomenon] + [under conditions] + [measurable outcome]

Examples of refinement:

❌ Vague: "How can we make transformers more efficient?" ✅ Concrete: "Does structured sparsity in attention patterns preserve performance on long-context tasks while reducing compute by >50%?"

❌ Vague: "Can robots learn from humans better?" ✅ Concrete: "Does incorporating gaze direction in demonstrations improve sample efficiency for manipulation tasks compared to kinesthetic teaching alone?"

❌ Vague: "What makes language models hallucinate?" ✅ Concrete: "Do retrieval-augmented models hallucinate less on factual questions when retrieval confidence is used to modulate generation temperature?"

Stage 5: Feasibility Check

For each refined question, assess:

Resources Required:

• Compute: GPU-hours estimate
• Data: Available or needs collection?
• Time: Weeks/months realistically
• Expertise: What skills are needed?

Risk Assessment:

• What's the probability this works at all?
• What if the hypothesis is wrong? (Is negative result publishable?)
• What could go wrong technically?
• What could invalidate the whole direction?

Dependencies:

• Does this require other work to finish first?
• Are there rate-limiting steps?
• What can be parallelized?

Stage 6: The Litmus Tests

A good research question passes all of these:

The Advisor Test:

"If I pitched this in 2 minutes, would a busy professor say 'yes, go do that' rather than 'hmm, let's talk more'?"

The Paper Test:

"Can I envision the title, abstract, and figure 1 of the resulting paper?"

The Null Result Test:

"If my hypothesis is wrong, would that still be interesting to report?"

The Motivation Test:

"Am I actually excited to work on this for 6+ months?"

The Explanation Test:

"Can I explain why this matters to a smart non-expert in 60 seconds?"

Output Format

Deliver a Research Question Brief:

# Research Question Brief

## The Interest (Raw)
[Original unfiltered interest]

## Territory Map

### What's Known
- [Point 1] ([citation])
- [Point 2] ([citation])

### What's Unknown
- [Open question 1]
- [Open question 2]

### What's Controversial
- [Debate 1]

## Candidate Gaps
1. [Gap 1]
2. [Gap 2]
3. [Gap 3]

## Refined Questions

### Question 1: [Title]
**Statement:** [Precise question]
**Hypothesis:** [What you expect to find]
**Feasibility:** [Brief assessment]
**If it works:** [Impact]
**If it doesn't:** [What we still learn]

### Question 2: [Title]
[Same structure]

## Recommendation
[Which question to pursue and why]

## Immediate Next Steps
1. [Concrete action 1]
2. [Concrete action 2]
3. [Concrete action 3]

Common Failure Modes

The Kitchen Sink: Trying to answer too many questions at once → Fix: Ruthlessly cut until there's ONE core question

The Solution in Search of a Problem: Starting with a method, not a question → Fix: Ask "Who has this problem? Why hasn't it been solved?"

The Incremental Trap: Small delta on existing work → Fix: Ask "Would this change how people think?"

The Impossible Dream: Beautiful question, can't be answered → Fix: Ask "What's the minimal version that's still interesting?"

The Boring Sure Thing: Will definitely work, nobody cares → Fix: Add ambition until there's meaningful risk