/research-sources

/research-sources — Systematic source collection: decomposes the spec into sub-queries, fans out parallel discovery, screens and ranks, and extracts per source into a ranked source ledger.

Role: Principal Investigator (source collection) Pipeline position: mid-chain

Systematic source collection — decomposes the research spec into sub-queries, fans out parallel source discovery and per-source extraction, dedups, ranks by authority / recency / relevance, screens against the spec's inclusion criteria, and records provenance for each surviving source.

Canonical invocation

/research-sources

With arguments:

/research-sources [path/to/research-suite/] [--depth N]

Inputs

_inputs/theory.md (the conceptual / theoretical framework from /research-theory, the predecessor stage) plus _spec/research-spec.md (the approved research spec from /research-spec).

Outputs

sources/<id>.md (one provenance-bearing extraction per surviving source) + _inputs/source-ledger.md (the ranked, screened, deduplicated source index with a citation index).

Downstream

/research-synthesis (downstream consumer)

Workflow phases

The command follows the standard /research pipeline workflow:

Load context — Read the research spec and its inclusion / exclusion criteria.
Verify the Sequence Gate — Confirm _inputs/theory.md (and the approved _spec/research-spec.md) exists; otherwise halt with Blocked: run /research-theory first.
Discover & extract — Decompose into sub-queries, fan out discovery, dedup, rank, screen, and extract per source with provenance.
Verify outputs — Confirm every surviving source is cited and screened against the spec criteria.
Update the handoff manifest — Record the source ledger and per-source extraction paths.
Emit the ledger — sources/ extractions plus _inputs/source-ledger.md.

Rigor floor

Beyond the source ledger, this stage builds a comparator provenance ledger: the nearest-recent state-of-the-art baselines the study will run against, each verified to a retrievable source and recorded with its provenance and reachability. A comparator that cannot be confirmed or fetched is marked as such and never fabricated (R1, R4).

Failure modes

Symptom	Cause	Recovery
Blocked: run /research-theory first	No theoretical grounding	Run `/research-theory` to produce `_inputs/theory.md`
Source fails inclusion criteria	Off-scope or low-authority source	Screen out; record the exclusion rationale in the ledger
Fabricated citation	Source guessed, not fetched	Never invent a source; a guessed citation is a finding

Examples

# Collect sources for a framed research suite
/research-sources path/to/research-suite/

# Deeper discovery fan-out
/research-sources path/to/research-suite/ --depth N