Storm research
Use when researching any topic, question, market, company, technology, or decision — before writing reports or proposals, making business or investment decisions, preparing for negotiations, interviews, or presentations, or learning a new field. This is the default research method for all research tasks. Skip only for single-fact lookups, or when the user explicitly asks for a quick answer or names a different method.From its SKILL.md
npx -y skills add josherau/claude-operating-core --skill storm-researchAssembled from the repository path, not quoted from the project. Check it against their README if it does not work.
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SKILL.md
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STORM Research
Overview
Multi-perspective research method adapted from Stanford's STORM (Shao et al., NAACL 2024, github.com/stanford-oval/storm). Core principle: one query returns the majority view; five grounded perspectives plus a contradiction map returns understanding. The STORM paper reports ~25% better organization and ~10% broader coverage from multi-perspective question asking versus its single-pass baseline.
The Iron Rule: every perspective must be grounded in real retrieval. Persona-prompting without sources is five flavors of one model's blind spots hallucinating in harmony. Each perspective's claims come from actual searches (WebSearch, WebFetch, or whatever search MCPs you have wired up) with sources noted. No search → no claim.
The Four Phases
Run all four, in order. Do not stop after Phase 1 or 3.
Phase 1 — Multi-Perspective Scan
Pick 5 perspectives suited to the topic. Default set:
| Perspective | Asks |
|---|---|
| Practitioner | What actually happens day-to-day? What breaks in reality? |
| Skeptic | What's overhyped or wrong? What could fail? |
| Economist | Who profits? What incentives shape the claims? |
| Historian | Has this pattern happened before? How did it end? |
| Academic | What does the actual evidence/data say? |
Swap perspectives when the topic demands (e.g. regulator, customer, competitor, clinician). For each: generate that persona's 2-3 sharpest questions, then search to answer them. Note the source for each finding.
Phase 2 — Contradiction Map
Find where the perspectives fight and why. Rules of evidence:
- All 5 agree → probably true.
- Perspectives conflict → the real understanding lives here; name the disagreement and the reason (incentive, timeframe, evidence quality).
- Nobody addressed it → you found a gap; say so explicitly.
Phase 3 — Synthesis
One briefing: what's established (with sources), the named contradictions, reliability ranking of major claims, and a specific recommended action — not a summary that hedges everything.
Phase 4 — Peer Review
Adversarially grade your own output: strongest claim, weakest claim, likely source bias, missing perspective, and a confidence score per key conclusion. The original STORM pipeline has no self-critique step, so this phase is our addition — and it is not optional. (And per the review-panel rule: Phase 4 is still self-critique — the finished deliverable gets an independent reviewer too.)
Scaling
| Mode | When | How |
|---|---|---|
| Quick | Casual question, minutes matter | 3 perspectives, ~5 searches, all inline |
| Standard (default) | Most research requests | 5 perspectives, 8-15 searches, inline or 2-3 parallel subagents |
| Deep | "Thorough/comprehensive/audit" | One subagent per perspective in parallel, then synthesize; consider a dedicated deep-research harness if you run one |
Output Shape
Deliver: Briefing (synthesis + recommended action) → Contradiction map → Perspective findings with sources → Peer review with confidence scores. Briefing first — the reader gets the answer before the apparatus.
Common Mistakes
- Answering from training data with persona flavoring. The perspectives structure the questions; retrieval answers them.
- Perspectives that converge. If the skeptic sounds like the academic, you picked lazy personas — force genuine disagreement in framing.
- Skipping Phase 2. The contradiction map is the step that separates this from a book report.
- Skipping Phase 4 to save time. 60 seconds of self-critique is the method's error bar.
What ships with it
Read from the repository
Just SKILL.md. No reference files, no scripts.
Gives 0 of the 12 instructions most research analysis skills give in 810 tokens
Counted across 1,213 of the 2,113 authors here whose files we hold, read 2026-09-06
- Cite sources for every important claimin 47 of 1213, across 38 files
- Separate facts from inferences and recommendationsin 21 of 1213, across 12 files
- Write findings to a markdown filein 19 of 1213
- Label every insight with a confidence levelin 18 of 1213, across 8 files
- Read product marketing context before asking questionsin 18 of 1213, across 8 files
- Rank themes by frequency and intensityin 16 of 1213, across 6 files
- Establish research mode before proceedingin 16 of 1213, across 6 files
- Segment survey responses by customer tier or tenurein 16 of 1213, across 6 files
- Categorize support tickets before analyzingin 16 of 1213, across 6 files
- Weight research sources from the last twelve monthsin 16 of 1213, across 6 files
- Use at least five data points per segmentin 15 of 1213, across 5 files
- Extract verbatim quotes for all research findingsin 15 of 1213, across 5 files
Said here and by no other author read
- Select five distinct research perspectives
- Generate sharp questions for each persona
- Search to answer all generated questions
- Note sources for every finding
- Identify conflicts between perspectives
- Explain reasons for identified disagreements
Grouped from the skills themselves: near-identical wordings counted once, and counted by distinct author, so one author publishing three of these counts once. Length counted with cl100k_base; the agent that loads this file may tokenize it differently.