Purpose & Overview¶
Chapter 00 of the ResearchTools manual. Root entry point: ../../README.md.
Purpose¶
Ask for my book (French version): Vibe Design. 30$ contribution via:
ResearchTools is an AI-assisted toolbox for researcher-professors and graduate students who want to design, find and fix the issues hiding in their academic design, writing before a reviewer, a thesis committee, or a grant panel does. It offers a Dashboard to follow the work-in-progress and has self-learning functions.
Never let an LLM do your work for you. Use it to improve your work, find your weaknesses, and help you improve yourself. Never use these tools to conduct a formal or professional assessment, and do not let the tool make decisions for you. Use at your own risk.
Always uses a logo when using these tools, such as: https://www.uqac.ca/ressourcespedago/iag/
ResearchTools contains two loop for authoring and coding. It covers the whole process: starting a literature review, auditing an existing review, a complete paper, a UQAC thesis or thesis proposal, cleaning/improving a BibTeX file, helping to respond to peer reviewers, checking submission readiness against a target journal, building the submission package, and converting Word to LaTeX with high accuracy. Moreover, it offers the process to design the code, PCB and 3D CAD with a full Dashboard to see the agents working in background including some controls.
Every check is grounded in the same working norms: no reference enters a document without being validated against Scopus (no fabricated citations, no invented DOIs), weaknesses are reported as actionable findings with an executable improvement plan rather than vague encouragement, and drafts pass a multi-model deliberation (Gemini + GitHub Copilot debate, arbitrated with Claude) before a plan or review is finalized. Each improvment is evaluated with a score and then you can see the quantitative improvments.
An agent, \local-writer, manage the memories with a Daemon: Obsidian Vault and Graphify. The Harness cannot access to the memories directly. A control is applied on the Harness for the code generation: when the harness needs to generate a code to overcome a weakness in ResearchTools, it is integrated in the ResearchTools clone with an auto-update in your system. Then, ResearchTools will change over time and with your specific usage.
The toolbox is built as software, agents, skills, and commands for Claude Code,
with generated mirrors for GitHub Copilot, OpenCode, Continue, Aider, Codex, and other
AGENTS.md readers (see Installation). Typical entry points: /litreview for a new topic (review update using \litreview-updater),
/auditpaper before submitting, /auditthesis before a defense, /bibclean on any
.bib file, /replyreviewer when the reviews come back.
TODO in 2026¶
1- ~~Agent paper2talk (latex paper to a talk for a conference using some parameters such as time 10 to 12 minutes) for conference (september 2026).~~ Done 2026-08-12: the paper2talk skill, the talk-builder agent, and /talk.
2- Agent thesis2defence (latex thesis to defence talk in Beamer, 30 to 45 minutes), october 2026.
3- Thesis-Tracker: full UI/UX with user login, database, to fill paperworks, forms, track paper submission process, manage mindmap to create new paper ideas, end of 2026. We need to investigate if we use n8n/OpenClaw/Hermes/OpenHands/?, or other agents over a cloud or local on a server.
4- plugin in marketplace with automatic update.
About this manual¶
Reference for the skills, agents and commands shipped in this repository. Everything
documented here lives under .claude/ in this repo (academic research tooling for
LaTeX writing, Scopus reference validation, paper/thesis auditing, and grant-template
conversion). For a map of how the pieces relate, see Architecture.md.
The repo ships 18 skills, 19 agents, and 27 commands.
This manual is split into chapters under docs/manual/, the same way
Architecture.md is already split into layers rather than kept as one
flat file — the root README.md is now a table of contents, not the full text. Two files
share a similar name and a different job: Architecture.md maps this repository's own
agents/skills/commands (7 layers); NEW_ARCHITECTURE.md, at the repo root, is the architecture
shared with the sibling repository ThesisTracker (committed identically to main in both).
Chapter 09 covers that boundary.