gap-to-topic

Choosing a thesis or proposal topic is not "do a literature review." It is a decision under uncertainty: given everything already known, what should I do next, and why is it defensible? This skill produces the document that decision actually needs — a 3-gate decision dossier for one (or a few) candidate breakthrough points.

It deliberately stops short of the verdict. It assembles the evidence for three gates and hands the final "is this worth doing" call back to the researcher and their advisor — where it belongs.

When to use

Trigger phrases:

• "Is this research gap worth pursuing?"
• "Help me pick a thesis / proposal topic."
• "Is this idea already taken? / has someone done this?"
• "Find me a defensible research gap in <area>."
• "Vet this research idea before I commit."
• "Should I do this? / should I commit to this?"

Not for:

• A comparison matrix over a known paper set — that's literature-triage-matrix.
• Designing the study once a topic is chosen — that's research-design-helper (gap-to-topic assembles options for the researcher to choose; research-design-helper designs how after that choice).
• A narrative literature review — that's a writing task.
• Building manuscript claim memory — that's paper-memory-builder.

What it produces

.research/topic_dossier.md and .research/topic_dossier.docx — a research-grade decision memo in Markdown and as a colour-coded Word document: first page enables a decision; the body supports verification; the appendices support a re-run. Reads top-to-bottom in Word with no decoding — no codes (G1/G2 stay only in .gaps.yml), no decorative glyphs, plain-language verdicts, decision-relevant tables in the body and reference / log tables in the appendices. Verdict cells are colour-coded in the .docx (light red / yellow / green / grey by verdict phrase, bilingual en + zh-TW).

(SKILL.md §0–§4 below are the agent's internal workflow steps; they map to the reader-facing sections above — §0 → §2 Candidate Definitions, §1 → §3 Decision Scorecards + §4 Evidence Base + §5 Gate 1, etc.)

Plus two machine-readable companions: <dossier>.bib (the Gate 1 reference list as BibTeX) and <dossier>.gaps.yml (structured candidates + verdicts + open questions — keeps the machine ids and enum tokens).

When a version-bound materials/resource record is useful, optionally add candidate_version to the relevant candidates and a separate <dossier>.direction-review.json. This is an opt-in offline check, not a new requirement for natural-language ideation or the ordinary dossier workflow.

The three gates organize the assessment; a supported hard failure cannot be compensated by another score. Unassessed prerequisites remain unresolved, not a scientific failure or automatic go. The dossier supports the human decision.

Inputs

In priority order:

1. A research area or a candidate idea, stated by the user in conversation.
2. .research/literature_matrix.md — produced in §1 step 2, or reused (appended to) if an earlier run already wrote one.
3. .research/claims.yml if it exists — only when the user is also drafting a manuscript; its status: gap claims cross-link to §2.
4. The user's free-text answers during the §0 and §3 conversational steps.

This skill orchestrates other research-hub capabilities as tools: search --adversarial --screen --json (§1 step 1 — recall, the fit-check BM25 relevance gate, and the metadata the .bib is built from) and literature-triage-matrix (§1 step 2 — turns the on-topic search results into the prior-art comparison matrix). paper gaps is used only when a relevant ingested cluster already exists — at topic-selection time it usually does not, so the search → literature-triage-matrix path is the default. Note: cite --format bibtex is not used for the §1 .bib — it resolves identifiers only against an already-ingested Zotero library, and at topic-selection time the candidate papers are not ingested (see §1 step 3).

Shared research contract

Use ../research-hub/references/research-protocol.md for the user's original constraints, information-needs/query map, closest prior work and contrary/dead-end searches, and bounded completion. Use ../research-hub/references/source-claim-audit.md for actual evidence levels and version-bound source passages. Missing Hub runtime blocks its commands/writes, not available native discovery. Preserve explicit population/geography/date boundaries; suggested filters are not user decisions. If these shared files are absent in a standalone install, retain these rules and disclose any unassessed load-bearing evidence rather than implying novelty.

Workflow

Run §0–§4 in order. Each section has a fixed contract; do not skip a gate.

§0 — Candidate breakthrough point(s)

Socratic, like research-design-helper. Help the user articulate candidates within the stated objective; zero or multiple justified options are valid. Keep improving an existing method/design and proposing a new concept/mechanism as equally valid routes, without a quota. A paper need not explicitly name a gap. Separate sourced premises, inferences and proposed benefits; an unmeasured effect is a research question, not automatic infeasibility. Retain useful replication, validation, exploratory or simple-method options. Do not invent the user's objective or constraints. For each candidate:

• Give it a short, readable name — it becomes the candidate's heading in the dossier ("The candidates" section). The G1 / G2 id is only a machine tag for the .gaps.yml companion; it must never be the reader's primary label.
• Classify the opening type, and write it in plain words in the dossier:
  • Type A — method-limitation opening: an existing method cannot do X ("traditional ABM cannot give agent profiles via text").
  • Type B — unoccupied-application opening: no equivalent application has been located within the declared search scope ("application coverage unresolved for X"). This is an openness hypothesis, not a literature-wide absence claim; compare closest work before narrowing it.

A multi-gap candidate is decomposed into its constituent gaps; every later gate runs per gap.

§1 — Gate ① — Open?

Incomplete recall is the dominant failure mode: a missed paper makes a gap look open when it is not. So this gate is adversarial:

1. Map every material information need to a distinct search family and record planned vs executed status. Use available native tools or, when appropriate, run research-hub search --adversarial --screen --json on the gap. It searches several query phrasings, reports observed result counts with recall explicitly unassessed, and applies the fit-check BM25 relevance gate. Zero new papers can reflect backend failure, a successful empty response or overlapping top-N results; these counts do not establish saturation. With --screen --json the output is an object {screening_summary, results}: results is the per-paper list (title, DOI / arXiv ID, year, authors, venue, plus a relevance field — score / kept / tier / reason), and screening_summary gives the retrieved / kept / screened-out counts. --screen never drops a paper — it tags relevance, so recall stays auditable. If --adversarial or --screen is unavailable (older CLI), run several query phrasings by hand and record the missing execution evidence and search limits in the dossier.
2. Screen candidates against the preserved scope. In CLI mode, inspect results and the relevance gate's kept/reason; in native mode, record actual inclusion/exclusion decisions and reasons without inventing CLI fields. Feed the on-topic works to literature-triage-matrix (as its input #0, a Markdown list of titles + DOIs / arXiv IDs) to produce .research/literature_matrix.md: the structured prior-art comparison (per paper — method, main claim, evidence, limitation, relevance). Relevance scores are screening aids, not scientific verdicts. Retain screened-out candidates and reasons in the log; check decision-relevant closest/contrary/boundary evidence before excluding it. This matrix is a real workflow output — it is what the openness judgement in step 4 and the §2 gates read, not an assumed pre-existing input. If a literature_matrix.md from an earlier run exists, literature-triage-matrix appends to it; if either skill is unavailable, reason directly over the observed candidates and record the reduced structure in the dossier.
3. Build the reference list for the assessed scope as the .bib companion from verified on-topic candidate metadata (CLI results or actual native observations) — this is the trust artifact; the researcher must be able to verify "open" themselves. Do not use cite --format bibtex here: cite resolves identifiers only against an already-ingested Zotero library, and at topic-selection time the candidate papers are not ingested. Verify supplied DOI/arXiv IDs when available. A missing identifier does not make a work nonexistent: qualitative, historical or archival sources can use verified title/author/date, stable collection/catalog locator and acquisition provenance. Unresolved identity remains explicitly unresolved; never drop inconvenient prior work merely because it has no DOI.
4. Record recall limits as a headline, not a footnote. In CLI mode, report available screening_summary counts; in native mode, report observed counts and tool references, leaving inaccessible payloads or backend totals unknown. Do not infer recall confidence from counts alone. Reason the per-gap openness over the step-2 matrix, comparing the closest works by question, population/system, method and outcome. Search failures, truncation or unknown native payloads are not zero-result proof of openness.

Use the template's candidate revision record after closest/contrary comparison: retain the original proposition, observed overlap, revised proposition and remaining discriminating test. Do not leave an unchanged novelty claim behind a generic unknown verdict when observed prior work already narrows it.

A gap is never declared "open" on the basis of "absent from my corpus" — absence in a corpus is not absence in the literature.

§2 — Gate ② — A contribution?

Two parts — see the references for the full method:

• Dead-end history (references/dead-end-history.md): find the "tried-but-unsolvable" history. A gap can be open because the field gave up on it (a dead end), not because no one tried.
• Contribution typing (references/contribution-typing.md): classify the candidate as problem-solving or incremental. This is a descriptive lens, not a quality verdict — incremental is not "not worth doing."

Both parts must also explain significance and decision relevance: who benefits, what changes if the contribution succeeds, and why the closest alternative does not already resolve the problem. Compare plausible alternatives, boundary conditions, and upgrade/kill tests. A newly combined method alone is not proof of a meaningful contribution; retained dead-end evidence may overturn optimism.

§3 — Gate ③ — Feasible?

Front-loaded by design: the researcher must know feasibility before building the research framework, before spending money and running experiments. Socratically establish data / resource accessibility — is the data public? what does it cost? how long to obtain? — and record a verdict. Include data access/quality, skills/compute, time and cost, ethics/consent and applicable approvals, execution/analysis validation, and a feasible fallback. Do not treat unconfirmed access or permissions as available. Check actual materials/variables, temporal or spatial granularity, applicability and quality; a successful download is not sufficient. Specify the minimum study and a simpler/closest baseline with an informative validation path within confirmed resources. A missing enabling prerequisite is unknown, not a zero score or supported failure; record a bounded next check. Hard blockers cannot be averaged away or compensated by value. Revise substantive mismatches, park critical unknowns, and reject only with supported negative evidence. Preserve a useful alternative when another candidate fails, and do not silently change scope. Use applicable reason-specific checks: missing closest/contrary evidence needs a bounded targeted lookup; an already-realized increment needs repositioning; a material/granularity mismatch needs suitable alternatives or a user scope decision; a resource overrun needs a value-preserving minimum version or parking; unconfirmed critical access needs a bounded access/permission check.

Optional version-bound offline check

Use research-hub paper direction-check --dossier <dossier>.gaps.yml --review <dossier>.direction-review.json --source-root <local-root> --json when the caller wants to check supplied candidate/source bindings and combined planned estimates. It reads only the explicit local inputs, without reading Hub configuration, calling a model/network, writing files or starting the next stage. The exact contract is in docs/direction-review-contract.md in the research-hub repository; references/dossier-template.md summarizes the optional companion.

• Bind each reviewed candidate with its ID, positive-integer candidate_version and canonical hash of the complete candidate. Preserve old review records when revising; a version or content change requires a fresh review. Never assume a missing legacy version is 1. Old dossiers still work in the ordinary flow.
• Record all seven kinds: data, tool, model, license, cost, premise and validation-path. Each may have multiple named checks. Distinguish supported, contradicted, unknown and not-applicable; supply evidence references for the first two, a bounded next check for unknowns and an applicability reason for not-applicable. Theory need not invent data/models.
• Bind evidence to actual local bytes, a concrete locator, actual material level and recorded publication version. Preserve existing context provenance; a local note is not the original full paper. An explicit unknown publication version remains unresolved metadata even if its byte hash is current.
• Declare the combined candidate scope, required resource units, components, estimate evidence and capacities/decision references. Add separate demands; count a shared component once only with explicit scope and sharing_basis. Missing sharing basis, demand or capacity leaves the relevant result unknown. Units stay separate; unknown is not zero. The checker cannot find omitted work.
• Read record_status, binding_status, prerequisites and resource_estimates together. Exit 0 means a structurally valid/current report completed, including reports with unknown/contradicted assessments or estimates over budget. It does not establish semantic support, actual runtime budget, scientific feasibility, human selection or execution permission.

Carry unresolved and stale items into the human discussion. If supplied totals exceed capacity, compare a minimum version that still answers the question or park it; do not silently change the goal, remove necessary baselines or increase the budget. An optional check never replaces the three gates or user choice.

§4 — Handed back to the human

The dossier ends by stating explicitly: it has assembled the three gate-verdicts; whether the gap is worth doing is the researcher's and advisor's call. The skill never makes that call. Explain actual options, tradeoffs and reason-specific next checks without forcing a rejected/conditional pair. An eligible go or conditional-go is an assessment, not a user choice, even for a sole candidate. Use an actual prior selection if clear; otherwise ask which direction to design before handing it to research-design-helper. Do not invent approval or start design/experiments from a next-step suggestion.

§4.5 — Generate .docx

After .research/topic_dossier.md is written, run the bundled generator to produce the matching Word deliverable:

# From the dossier's output directory (e.g. .research/ or en/)
node /path/to/skills/gap-to-topic/scripts/dossier_to_docx.js topic_dossier [--no-toc]

Prerequisite: npm install -g docx (or cd scripts && npm install docx for a local install). See scripts/README.md for full invocation details and the zh-TW case.

The script produces topic_dossier.docx alongside the .md. It colour-codes verdict cells (light red / yellow / green / grey), auto-selects font (Microsoft JhengHei for zh-TW filenames, Arial otherwise), skips Markdown separator rows, and inserts a TOC + page break after the first table (suppress with --no-toc).

Honesty rules

• Never decide "worth it." §4 is a hard boundary.
• Quote verification: every evidence quote in §1/§2 must be confirmed to exist in the cited source; an unverified quote is dropped, not downgraded.
• Absence is not proof: every "open" verdict carries the recall caveat.
• Screening-grade, not systematic: the dossier says so in §4.
• No fabricated identifiers: verify supplied DOI/arXiv IDs; identifier-free sources need explicitly verified bibliographic/acquisition provenance.

References

• references/dossier-template.md — the blank reader-first dossier + companion-file schemas.
• references/dead-end-history.md — §2 dead-end detection method.
• references/contribution-typing.md — §2 contribution-type classification.