Research Templates

Three academic templates for structuring refined research ideas. Use when RefineIdea to choose the output structure that best fits the research type.

Template Selection

Template ID	Use When	Core Fields
heilmeier_catechism	Engineering/applied research, system building, DARPA-style proposals	problem_statement, state_of_the_art, key_insight, impact, technical_plan, risks_and_mitigations
scientific_discovery	Theoretical AI, algorithms, experiments (NeurIPS/ICLR style)	research_question, hypothesis, related_work_gap, proposed_method, experimental_design, expected_results
system_optimization	Performance tuning, resource efficiency, benchmarking	target_system, bottleneck_analysis, optimization_strategy, implementation_steps, evaluation_metrics

Heilmeier Catechism

For engineering and applied research. You may use these fields to organize your output (not required):

• problem_statement: What is the problem? Why does it matter?
• state_of_the_art: Current solutions and limitations
• key_insight: Novel angle or approach
• impact: Expected benefit (e.g. efficiency, scalability)
• technical_plan: High-level implementation steps
• risks_and_mitigations: Main risks and how to address them

Scientific Discovery

For theory and experiments. You may use these fields (not required):

• research_question: Central RQ (RQ1:, RQ2:)
• hypothesis: Testable claim
• related_work_gap: Limitations of prior work
• proposed_method: Method outline
• experimental_design: Setup, metrics, baselines
• expected_results: Anticipated findings

System Optimization

For performance and efficiency. You may use these fields (not required):

• target_system: System or component to optimize
• bottleneck_analysis: Current limitations
• optimization_strategy: Approach (e.g. caching, parallelism)
• implementation_steps: Concrete steps
• evaluation_metrics: How to measure success

Use whichever structure best fits the research type. Quality matters; schema is flexible.