Research Planning

Create comprehensive research plans and paper architectures from a research topic or idea.

Input

$0 — Research topic, idea description, or paper to reproduce

References

Planning prompts from Paper2Code, AI-Researcher, AgentLaboratory: ~/.claude/skills/research-planning/references/planning-prompts.md
Output schemas and templates: ~/.claude/skills/research-planning/references/output-schemas.md

Workflow

Step 1: Understand the Research Context

Read any provided papers, code, or references
Identify the core research question and its significance
Assess available resources (datasets, compute, existing code)

Step 2: Generate Research Plan

Use the 4-stage planning approach (adapted from Paper2Code):

Overall Plan — Strategic overview: methodology, key experiments, evaluation metrics
Architecture Design — File structure, system design, Mermaid class/sequence diagrams
Logic Design — Task breakdown with dependencies, required packages, shared knowledge
Configuration — Extract or specify hyperparameters, training details, config.yaml

Step 3: Structure the Paper

Design the paper structure with section-by-section plan:

Abstract, Introduction, Background, Related Work, Methods, Experiments, Results, Discussion/Conclusion
For each section: key points to cover, required figures/tables, target word count

Step 4: Create Task Dependency Graph

Order tasks by dependency (data → model → training → evaluation → writing)
Identify parallelizable tasks
Flag risks and potential failure modes

Output Format

{
  "research_question": "...",
  "methodology": "...",
  "paper_structure": {
    "sections": ["Abstract", "Introduction", ...],
    "section_plans": { "Introduction": "..." }
  },
  "task_list": [
    {"task": "...", "depends_on": [], "priority": 1}
  ],
  "baselines": ["..."],
  "datasets": ["..."],
  "evaluation_metrics": ["..."],
  "risks": ["..."]
}

Rules

Each plan component must be detailed and actionable
Include specific implementation references when available
Ensure all components work together coherently
Always include a testing/evaluation plan
Flag ambiguities explicitly rather than making assumptions

Related Skills

Upstream: idea-generation, literature-review
Downstream: experiment-design, paper-assembly
See also: atomic-decomposition

research-planning