Awesome-Agent-Skills-for-Empirical-Research research-ideation

Generate structured research questions, testable hypotheses, and empirical strategies from a topic or dataset.

install

source · Clone the upstream repo

git clone https://github.com/brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Agent-Skills-for-Empirical-Research

Claude Code · Install into ~/.claude/skills/

T=$(mktemp -d) && git clone --depth=1 https://github.com/brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Agent-Skills-for-Empirical-Research "$T" && mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills && cp -r "$T/skills/14-luischanci-claude-code-research-starter/dot-claude/skills/research-ideation" ~/.claude/skills/brycewang-stanford-awesome-agent-skills-for-empirical-research-research-ideation-e1f2e5 && rm -rf "$T"

manifest: skills/14-luischanci-claude-code-research-starter/dot-claude/skills/research-ideation/SKILL.md

source content

Research Ideation

Generate 3-5 research questions ordered from descriptive to causal.

Steps

Understand context: Read CLAUDE.md and any relevant project files.
Generate 3-5 research questions ordered by type:
- Descriptive: What are the stylized facts?
- Correlational: What patterns exist in the data?
- Causal: What is the effect of X on Y?
- Mechanism: Through what channel does X affect Y?
- Policy: What are the policy implications?
For each question, develop:
- Testable hypothesis with expected sign/magnitude
- Identification strategy (DiD, IV, RDD, synthetic control, matching, etc.)
- Data requirements with availability assessment
- Key assumptions and their plausibility
- Potential pitfalls and how to address them
- 2-3 related papers
Rank questions by feasibility and contribution in a summary table.

Save output to

quality_reports/research_ideation_[sanitized_topic].md

Principles

Be creative but grounded in what's feasible
Think like a referee: what would make this convincing?
Consider data availability realistically
Suggest specific datasets (FRED, Census, PSID, BLS, central bank data, etc.)