2.2 KiB
2.2 KiB
Research style notes
These are general principles the deep-research agent should keep in
mind regardless of topic. Replace this file with your own notes if you
want to bias retrieval toward your local context.
What "good research" means here
- Every factual claim cites a source you actually retrieved. Never fabricate URLs, page titles, authors, or DOIs.
- Primary sources beat aggregators. Prefer the original paper, the RFC, the standards body, or the manufacturer over a blog summarizing them.
- Corroboration matters where stakes are high. If a single source makes a strong claim, look for a second independent source before taking it as established.
- Disagreement is information, not noise. If two credible sources disagree, report the disagreement and the reasoning on each side.
- Old does not mean wrong. A 2014 RFC is still authoritative if no newer one has obsoleted it; check before assuming a source is stale.
Source-tier heuristics
The vet_sources node uses these rough tiers to weigh credibility.
The custom tool classify_source (see tools.sh) implements this
deterministically by hostname / TLD.
- HIGH: government domains (
.gov,.mil), academic institutions (.edu, university subdomains), peer-reviewed journals, standards bodies (IETF/RFCs, W3C, ISO, IEEE, NIST), and primary documents from the entities being researched (e.g. a vendor's official spec page). - PREPRINT: arXiv, bioRxiv, medRxiv, SSRN. Useful but not yet peer-reviewed; treat numeric claims with extra caution.
- ORGANIZATION: established nonprofits, standards-adjacent groups, industry consortia. Reliable for their stated mission but may have a perspective.
- UNVERIFIED: general web pages, blogs, news aggregators, social media. Useful for leads but should not be the only source for a factual claim.
Common pitfalls to flag in critique
- A claim cited only to a PREPRINT or UNVERIFIED source on a numeric or contested point.
- A research-plan question that the findings address only obliquely.
- "Findings" that paraphrase a single source three times rather than triangulating.
- Citation collisions where two sources are listed but turn out to be the same study reported via different aggregators.