Research Ideate

---
name: research-ideate
description: "Decide whether a research idea is worth doing at all — before any work goes into it. Use when someone has an idea and asks: is this worth pursuing, should we take it on, is it a paper or just a blog post, is there a quick minimal result that doesn't need a dramatic finding, will it pull us away from our main line of work. Returns a go / no-go verdict with the sharpest framing, the minimal finding and the kinds of venue that would take it. Judges the idea by what counts in a body of work: a peer-reviewed indexed publication, a reusable method or benchmark rather than a one-off \"tool X is bad\", onward citations rather than GitHub stars, and one connected line rather than scattered topics. Stage: conception, before find-venue and before any draft; hands off to find-venue, build-benchmark, draft-paper."
allowed-tools: [Read, Write, Grep, Glob, Agent, Skill]
---

<!-- vigiles:sha256:03a0131d306d7ab0 compiled from skills/research-ideate/SKILL.md.spec.ts -->

# research-ideate — is this idea worth a paper, and does the paper earn authorship credit?

Runs BEFORE any effort is spent. An idea can be interesting and still be a bad *publication*
investment — the wrong framing produces something un-publishable or un-citable, which counts for
nothing toward a body of work. This skill kills those ideas early and reshapes the survivors into the framing
that publishes. It does NOT do the venue search (that's `find-venue`) — it decides whether there's a
paper worth taking to `find-venue` at all.

Grounding for every judgment below: the authorship, judging and original-contribution criteria —
what a reviewer of a body of work actually counts.

## Score the idea on five axes

Answer each explicitly. A "no" on (a) is a hard stop; a "no" on the rest is a reshape signal.

**(a) Does it yield a PEER-REVIEWED, INDEXED publication?**
This is the authorship criterion, full stop. The paper must land in indexed proceedings (ACM DL /
IEEE Xplore / archival workshop proceedings). Peer-reviewed + indexed papers count
**regardless of caliber** — conference and workshop proceedings qualify. There is **no
approved-venue list** and **venue newness does not hurt** the authorship criterion (prestige is
only a late-stage enhancer). So the bar here is binary: will
this produce something that goes through peer review and gets indexed? A blog post, a preprint that
never gets reviewed, or a non-archival talk = **no credit**. If the idea can't clear this, stop.

**(b) Is the contribution a reusable METHOD/BENCHMARK, or a one-off result?**
Reviewers accept methods and benchmarks; they reject "we ran tool X and it's bad." Name both framings:
- **Weakest framing** — the bare result. "Coding agent X produces insecure code." Reads as a blog
  post, doesn't generalize, dies in review, earns nothing citable.
- **Strongest framing** — the reusable artifact. The *way you measured it*: a benchmark, a metric, a
  probe, a protocol others can rerun against the next tool. That survives review AND gets cited when
  someone applies it to tool Y. Pick the strongest framing before writing a line.

**(c) Will it generate downstream CITATIONS / ADOPTION?**
This is the original-contribution criterion, and it is read through **citations and adoption, NOT
GitHub stars**. Ask: when the next person studies this space, must they cite or reuse this? A
benchmark others rerun, a metric others report, a finding others build on — yes. A one-off teardown of
one product — no. Methods/benchmarks (axis b) are exactly what earns this credit; scattered results do
not.

**(d) Is there a fast MVP finding — a "proof of method" that needs no scary result?**
The idea should have a small first result that *validates the method itself*, independent of how
dramatic the finding is. A **medium-severity finding is sufficient** if the method is the
contribution. You do not need to prove the tool is catastrophically broken; you need to prove your
measurement works and reveals something real. If the idea only pays off with a huge, hard-to-get
result, it's slow and risky — reshape it toward a proof-of-method MVP.

**(e) Does it stay in the researcher's coherent LANE?**
**Name the lane explicitly** — the research area the existing corpus is already in. A
connected corpus of papers in one lane beats scattered topics — review of a body of work rewards a
sustained, coherent corpus, not a grab-bag. Score whether this idea deepens the existing corpus
(good) or wanders into an unrelated field (weak, even if publishable). Same lane compounds; scattered
does not.

## Output

Emit a compact verdict:
1. **Go / No-go** — with the single reason. No-go if (a) fails, or if (b)+(c) can't be reshaped out of
   blog-post territory.
2. **Sharpest framing** — the one-sentence method/benchmark contribution, in its strongest form (the
   thing every future reviewer will paraphrase back). This sentence is the seed for `draft-paper`.
3. **The MVP finding** — the smallest proof-of-method result that validates the contribution;
   explicitly note the minimum severity that suffices (usually: medium is enough).
4. **2–3 candidate venue TYPES** — not specific venues (that's `find-venue`'s job), but the shape:
   e.g. "security-of-AI-coding workshop @ a top-tier security conference," "SE-measurement workshop @
   ASE/FSE," "eval/benchmark track." Hand these to `find-venue`.

## Rules
- Axis (a) is a gate, not a weight — no indexed peer review, no idea. Everything else reshapes.
- Never justify an idea by GitHub stars, demo virality, or "it'd be a great blog post." Those don't
  count. Citations/adoption and indexed proceedings do.
- Prefer the proof-of-method MVP over the heroic result — a shipped medium finding beats a stalled big
  one, and it's what earns the credit on time.
- Keep it in lane. If it's a great idea in the wrong field, say so and note it belongs elsewhere.
- Don't invent numbers, severities, or venue names here — this is a framing pass, not a study.

## Compose with
- `find-venue` (downstream) — hand it the candidate venue types + the sharpest framing.
- `build-benchmark` — the MVP finding usually IS a small benchmark; this skill scopes it.
- `draft-paper` — the sharpest-framing sentence becomes the paper's one-contribution seed.
- `plan-paper-timeline` — once go/no-go is "go," size the effort against a real deadline.

## Provenance
Both real papers passed this filter as **proof-of-method, medium-severity-is-sufficient** ideas in one
lane:
- **AgenticDev 2026 @ ASE — "Measuring the Wrong Number"** (~90%, submitted). The contribution was the
  *measurement method*, not a verdict on one tool; a medium-severity finding was enough because the
  reusable way-to-measure was the point. Stayed in the AI-assisted-SE reliability lane.
- **AISec 2026 @ ACM CCS — "Safety Theater in Agentic Coding"** (~87–88%). Same shape at a security
  bar: a reusable probe/finding about agentic coding safety, proof-of-method sufficient, squarely in
  the security-of-AI-coding lane. Together the two form a *connected corpus* — exactly what axis (e)
  rewards — rather than two scattered one-offs.