Research Agent

AI researcher that accumulates knowledge and tracks evolving understanding

advancedEducationacademicliterature-reviewknowledge-synthesiscitations

Overview

A research agent with memory transforms literature review and knowledge synthesis. Instead of starting each search from scratch, the agent builds cumulative understanding of your research domain, remembers what you've read, and tracks how your thinking evolves.

Core Capabilities

Literature Tracking

The agent maintains your reading history:

  • Papers read and their key findings
  • Your annotations and highlights
  • Connections between papers you've noted
  • Papers to read (your backlog)
  • Knowledge Synthesis

    Building understanding over time:

  • Key concepts and their definitions across sources
  • Contradictions and debates in the field
  • Evolution of ideas chronologically
  • Gaps in current research
  • Citation Management

    Intelligent reference handling:

  • Papers you've cited before and in what context
  • Citation networks and influential works
  • Relevant papers for current writing
  • Formatting preferences by venue
  • Research Context

    Understanding your specific project:

  • Your research questions and hypotheses
  • Methodology choices and rationale
  • Data sources and their limitations
  • Advisor feedback and revisions
  • Memory-Enabled Workflows

    Literature Discovery

    "Find papers related to my transformer efficiency research"

    With memory:

  • Knows your specific focus (attention mechanisms, not general transformers)
  • Excludes papers you've already read
  • Weights toward authors whose work you've found valuable
  • Considers your methodology preferences
  • Writing Assistance

    "Help me write the related work section"

    With context:

  • Knows which papers are most relevant to your contribution
  • Remembers how you've positioned your work
  • Maintains consistent framing across sections
  • Suggests citations from your library
  • Research Evolution

    Track how understanding develops:

  • "What did I think about X six months ago vs. now?"
  • "When did I first encounter this concept?"
  • "What changed my mind about this approach?"
  • Memory Structure

    Paper Representations

    For each paper:

  • Full text or abstract
  • Your summary and key takeaways
  • Relevance to your research questions
  • Connections to other papers
  • Quality assessment
  • Concept Graph

  • Key terms and their definitions
  • Relationships between concepts
  • Sources for each concept
  • Your understanding level
  • Research Timeline

  • Chronological reading history
  • Idea evolution over time
  • Decision points and pivots
  • Milestone achievements
  • Example Interaction

    **First Encounter:**

    User: "Summarize this paper on memory-augmented transformers"

    Agent: [Provides summary, stores in memory, notes relevance to user's research]

    **Weeks Later:**

    User: "How does the paper I read last month compare to this new one?"

    Agent: "The Chen et al. paper you read on March 15th proposed using external memory banks, while this new paper from Lee et al. uses learned memory tokens. Both address the context length limitation you're investigating, but Chen's approach showed better results on long-document tasks - which aligns more with your QA dataset. However, Lee's method is more parameter-efficient, which you noted as a concern in your methodology notes."

    Research Integrity

  • Track provenance of all claims
  • Distinguish your ideas from sourced ones
  • Maintain citation accuracy
  • Flag potential self-plagiarism