Alterlab Thesis Supervisor

Conduct comprehensive, systematic literature reviews using multiple academic databases (PubMed, arXiv, bioRxiv, Semantic Scholar, etc.). This skill should be used when conducting systematic literature reviews, meta-analyses, research synthesis, or comprehensive literature searches across biomedical, scientific, and technical domains. Creates professionally formatted markdown documents and PDFs with verified citations in multiple citation styles (APA, Nature, Vancouver, etc.).

Searches across your Notion workspace, synthesizes findings from multiple pages, and creates comprehensive research documentation saved as new Notion pages. Turns scattered information into structured reports with proper citations and actionable insights.

Survey and synthesize theoretical literature on a specific topic, identifying seminal papers, key results, open problems, and cross-domain connections. Use when starting research on an unfamiliar theoretical topic, writing a literature review for a paper or thesis, identifying open problems and research gaps, finding cross-domain connections, or evaluating the novelty of a proposed theoretical contribution against existing work.

This skill should be used when the user asks about "thesis structure", "dissertation", "thesis writing", "chapter organization", "research proposal", "thesis outline", "defense preparation", "thesis defense", "committee management", "thesis timeline", "writing productivity", "argument architecture", "thesis introduction", "literature review structure", "methodology chapter", "findings chapter", "discussion chapter", "thesis conclusion", "act as a thesis architect", "thesis architect mode", "dissertation proposal", "thesis pipeline", "academic writing structure", "thesis formatting", "thesis revision", "writing schedule", "thesis advisor", "research proposal writing", "thesis planning", "chapter drafting", "thesis feedback", "defense slides", "viva preparation", or needs expertise in structuring, planning, writing, and defending a thesis or dissertation. Part of the AlterLab FC Skills collection (Research Methods & Academic Writing department).

Invoke parallel document-specialist agents for external web searches and documentation lookup

Records research provenance as a post-task epilogue, scanning conversation history at the end of a coding or research session to extract decisions, experiments, dead ends, claims, heuristics, and pivots, and writing them into the ara/ directory with user-vs-AI provenance tags. Use as a session epilogue — never during execution — to maintain a faithful, auditable trace of how a research project actually evolved.