Ccf Literature Searcher

CCF Literature Searcher

Family File Contract

Before writing, resolve the canonical output and one stable working directory per task/artifact. Reuse explicit or established task paths; otherwise use project-root ccfa-workfiles/<purpose>/<artifact-id>/, with source/, assets/, cache/, and build/ only as needed. Update current files in place; do not scatter intermediates or create iteration copies. Preserve inputs and required evidence; clean only verified disposable files created by this task. Use UTF-8 text I/O and check Chinese text after saving or rendering. For file work, apply artifact-contracts.md and reuse the same paths across skill transitions.

Collaboration Contract

Before specialist execution, read and apply ccf-humanization first, then ccf-common. At every handoff, reuse their applicable active rules or refresh missing/changed ones. Both preflights are required even without prose; detailed editing, experiment, and maintenance modes run only when relevant.

Keep one integrating owner and actively use other skills to resolve missing prerequisites or check material findings. Reuse applicable evidence; do not skip necessary groundwork to save tokens. Before finalizing, integrate contributions and verify affected results. Follow the conditional cooperation routes; avoid unrelated stages and duplicate reports.

Invocation Controls

CCFA Handoff Mode: PARTIAL (Recommended). Follow metadata.ccf_skill_controls.handoff_question_mode and ../ccf-common/references/handoff-modes.md. Use ../ccf-common/references/routing.md to keep literature search separate from idea optimization, manuscript writing, experiment design, paper review, and rebuttal.

Load ../ccf-common/references/task-modes.md before deciding exploratory, quick, or standard mode. Use exploratory mode for early direction scouting, "看看还有没有机会", "这个方向是不是被做完了", or literature search meant to feed idea optimization rather than a final novelty verdict. Use quick mode for a narrow related-work scan or a small set of candidate citations. Use standard mode for Related Work, Introduction, mature idea novelty grounding, benchmark discovery, experiment design, or substantial multi-deliverable work. A small citation lookup stays quick even if a writer will use it.

If the user asks for recurring watch, latest-paper monitoring, competitor tracking, "recently any similar idea", arXiv/OpenReview feed scans, or lab/project tracking, route to ccf-literature-monitor by the shared handoff mode. Use this skill for deep retrieval, closest-work clustering, related-work structure, benchmark/dataset discovery, and citation candidates.

Treat user ideas, draft text, unpublished results, and private manuscripts as private material. Load ../ccf-common/references/privacy-and-evidence.md before browsing. Search with public keywords, public titles, venue names, method names, public abstracts, or user-approved query text. Do not paste private draft sentences into a search query unless the user explicitly authorizes it.

Source-quality exclusion: do not search, cite, recommend, or include policy-excluded venues, journals, URLs, or PDFs. The shared policy includes MDPI sources in this exclusion set; record exclusions only in internal screening or the search-notes file.

Core Rule

Ground novelty and positioning using high-quality, inspectable sources. Prefer influential conferences, strong journals, official proceedings pages, archival repositories, and public paper pages. Do not invent papers, citations, venues, links, acceptance status, benchmark status, or numerical results. Separate searched evidence from inference. Literature search is not a kill gate: the presence of related work should produce differentiation options, open gaps, benchmark/evidence choices, and caution labels before any "direction is covered" conclusion. Follow the user's requested output shape: short list, related-work clusters, opportunity map, BibTeX candidates, benchmark table, search folder, or handoff summary.

Mandatory Search Checklist

In standard mode, complete this checklist before final output. In quick mode, run the relevant subset and return a compact checklist status.

1. The user's topic is converted into safe public search queries.
2. Shared source-quality exclusions are applied to search domains, candidates, and final outputs.
3. Sources prioritize primary or high-confidence venues: official proceedings, arXiv/OpenReview when appropriate, ACL Anthology, CVF, PMLR, ACM, IEEE, USENIX, DBLP, Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref, and venue or project pages.
4. Candidate papers are deduplicated by title and linked to a stable URL.
5. Each included paper has venue/year/source status, paper type, and relevance rationale.
6. Score paper quality on insight, completeness, and experimental numeric evidence only when requested or useful for substantial screening, and only to the extent the inspected text supports it. Pure benchmark papers skip the numeric-results score and receive a benchmark-quality note instead.
7. Paper type is one of pure benchmark, pure method, method + benchmark, survey, system/tool, theory/proof, or other.
8. Every claim about a paper is traceable to the linked source or marked as inferred.
9. For idea-stage searches, each closest-work cluster includes what is already covered, what remains under-tested, and at least one possible differentiation or rescue route.
10. Write a literature-search folder only when reusable output is requested or needed for the authorized work. A bounded helper lookup can return verified evidence in context without a separate report.
11. When the search feeds idea optimization, an idea-grounding packet separates source-supported observations from inferred gaps and includes mechanism primitives, protocol anchors, cross-source conflict/open-gap relations, and confidence.
12. Optional handoff to ccf-literature-monitor, ccf-paper-writer, ccf-idea-optimizer, ccf-idea-reviewer, ccf-experiment-designer, or ccf-paper-reviewer follows CCFA handoff mode.

Workflow

1. Identify the search purpose: Related Work, Introduction support, novelty check, direction scouting, idea optimization, idea review, experiment design, benchmark/dataset discovery, or reviewer-risk diagnosis.
2. Create public queries from the user's topic. If the topic is too private or underspecified, ask only for non-sensitive keywords or infer broad keywords with lower confidence.
3. Load references/search-and-scoring.md. Use these search ranges as starting budgets, not quotas. Stop when the requested clusters, closest competitors, and evidence needs are covered and further retrieval adds no material information; broaden when a specific gap remains. Search breadth defaults:

• Exploratory: 10-20 screened candidates, 5-10 final papers or clusters, plus opportunity gaps.
• Quick: 6-10 screened candidates, 3-6 final papers.
• Standard: 15-30 screened candidates, 8-15 final papers unless the user requests another size.

These are planning ranges for standalone searches, not quotas. A helper lookup retrieves only the sources needed to resolve its assigned question and returns to the requesting owner. Honor a requested breadth; do not repeat verified searches or collect extra papers merely to reach a default count.

1. Search discovery indexes first, then verify candidates through stable paper pages or official proceedings when possible. Use broad web search only to find primary links; do not rely on snippets for final claims.