SituationalMITOriginal

Academic Brief

Summarises 3-5 academic papers on a topic into a plain-English brief with the core claim, method, and limitations of each.

Entry verified April 20, 2026

The short answer

For non-academics writing on technical topics (ML, biotech, economics). Turns unreadable papers into defensible claims you can cite in your post.

When to use it

Tech/science content. Newsletter pieces that reference research. Avoiding hand-wavy 'studies show' claims.

Setup

  1. 1

    Save as ~/.claude/agents/academic-brief.md.

  2. 2

    Tool access: web fetch (for open-access papers), PDF parse.

  3. 3

    Feed DOIs or arxiv links.

Example

You: /academic-brief — 3 papers on prompt chain-of-thought. [URLs]
Claude: Paper 1: claim + method + limitation. Paper 2: same. Paper 3: contrarian — worth citing.

Source & attribution

Author
Bryan Collins
Licence
MIT
Type
Original

Original pattern published under MIT — attribution preserved by convention, not licence requirement.

Caveats

Closed-access papers need manual download. LLM summarisation ≠ expert review — pair with real domain knowledge for stakes-worthy claims.

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