gap-to-topic

gap-to-topic is a skill for Claude Code from WenyuChiou/research-hub. It costs 182 tokens per session (3,024 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A decision dossier for judging one possible thesis or research topic against existing evidence.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to evaluate a proposed thesis topic or research gap before committing. It lays out evidence for a researcher and advisor to review.
Why use it?
It separates three questions: whether the research gap is still open, whether it could make a useful contribution, and whether the work is feasible.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the research-workspace plugin — 13 skills, 1 MCP server shipped together

Good fit Use it to evaluate a proposed thesis topic or research gap before committing. It lays out evidence for a researcher and advisor to review.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/wenyuchiou/research-hub/gap-to-topic
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add WenyuChiou/research-hub --skill gap-to-topic
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/WenyuChiou/research-hub

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install research-workspace, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 13 skills, 1 MCP server.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for gap-to-topic

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/wenyuchiou/research-hub/gap-to-topic/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/wenyuchiou/research-hub/gap-to-topic)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/wenyuchiou/research-hub/gap-to-topic"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/wenyuchiou/research-hub/gap-to-topic/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for gap-to-topic

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/wenyuchiou/research-hub/gap-to-topic"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/wenyuchiou/research-hub/gap-to-topic.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 182 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,024 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
How audits are shown
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00182 $0.03024
Opus 5 $0.00091 $0.01512
Sonnet 5 $0.00036 $0.00605
Haiku 4.5 $0.00018 $0.00302

Measured 10d ago against content hash 1c7d4579b386, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-10, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

gap-to-topic scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 10d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 1 executable file (scripts/dossier_to_docx.js), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/gap-to-topic/SKILL.md · 220 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 220 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

gap-to-topic

Choosing a thesis or proposal topic is not "do a literature review." It is a decision under uncertainty: given everything already known, what should I do next, and why is it defensible? This skill produces the document that decision actually needs — a 3-gate decision dossier for one (or a few) candidate breakthrough points.

It deliberately stops short of the verdict. It assembles the evidence for three gates and hands the final "is this worth doing" call back to the researcher and their advisor — where it belongs.

When to use

Trigger phrases:

  • "Is this research gap worth pursuing?"
  • "Help me pick a thesis / proposal topic."
  • "Is this idea already taken? / has someone done this?"
  • "Find me a defensible research gap in ."
  • "Vet this research idea before I commit."
  • "Should I do this? / should I commit to this?"

Not for:

  • A comparison matrix over a known paper set — that's literature-triage-matrix.
  • Designing the study once a topic is chosen — that's research-design-helper (gap-to-topic decides which topic; research-design-helper designs how).
  • A narrative literature review — that's a writing task.
  • Building manuscript claim memory — that's paper-memory-builder.

What it produces

.research/topic_dossier.md and .research/topic_dossier.docx — a research-grade decision memo in Markdown and as a colour-coded Word document: first page enables a decision; the body supports verification; the appendices support a re-run. Reads top-to-bottom in Word with no decoding — no codes (G1/G2 stay only in .gaps.yml), no decorative glyphs, plain-language verdicts, decision-relevant tables in the body and reference / log tables in the appendices. Verdict cells are colour-coded in the .docx (light red / yellow / green / grey by verdict phrase, bilingual en + zh-TW).

Section What it covers
1. Executive Decision Summary metadata box; one framing sentence; per-candidate verdict cards (small 2-column tables, generator colour-codes the verdict cell); a one-line key uncertainty
2. Candidate Definitions per candidate, name + one-sentence statement + a plain "why it could be a gap" tag ("No one has tried this" / "Current methods fall short")
3. Decision Scorecards per candidate, a small 3-column table (Gate / Score / Rationale) with the three gates rated 1–5 (Likert) plus a Verdict row; cells colour-coded by the generator
4. Evidence Base the search funnel, the prior-art classification, and the closest prior work per candidate with inline evidence-type tags
5. Gate-by-Gate Assessment each gate uses a fixed five-field skeleton: Score / Evidence / Interpretation / Risk / Action needed
6. Risks and Upgrade / Kill Tests named risks (construct validity, dataset, novelty, reproducibility); operational upgrade / kill test per conditional candidate; salvage path per failed candidate
7. Recommended Next Steps formal research-memo prose — the do-not-pursue topic and the conditional topic, with named actions
Appendix A. Search and Screening Protocol a reproducibility log — search date, databases, query families, retrieved, dedup, inclusion / exclusion, screening, known limitations, recall confidence
Appendix B. Deliverable File List the file index and the file tree

Read the full file on GitHub · 220 lines

Files

What ships with it

6 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 10d ago First seen · 220 lines · 182 tokens per session scan A 1c7d4579b386

Subscribe to this mod's changes

gap-to-topic is a skill published in the GitHub repository WenyuChiou/research-hub (54 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 182 tokens to every session and 3,024 once invoked, about $0.0009 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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