Priorwork

Priorwork

Hand your review of the prior work to an AI agent — then check it

For the social sciences and clinical research. Ask in plain words; check and correct in VS Code.

Get the VS Code extension Quick guide

Install

Install the VS Code extension and press Create a Workspace in its sidebar. That's all: Python is set up for you (without administrator rights). You need an AI agent that works in VS Code (Claude Code, Antigravity, …); Linux and macOS, or WSL on Windows.

What the agent does, without stopping

  1. Scope — research question, period, criteria, depth
  2. Search — Semantic Scholar + OpenAlex, and PubMed for clinical topics
  3. Screen — against your criteria, a reason for each
  4. Chase citations — references and citing papers
  5. Cards — from the abstracts and full texts
  6. Write — background, debates and gaps, from the cards
  7. Check and export — citations, DOIs, unchecked cards; HTML

What it does

Just ask in plain words

"Do a full review of …" in your agent's chat, or New Survey → Ask your agent to do it in the sidebar. No commands or skill names; the agent carries on to the end and reports what it decided.

Paper cards you can check

Research question, X, Y, data, identification, findings and limitations for each included paper, with how it was checked. The comparison matrix is built from them.

Search that finds the classics

Semantic Scholar by relevance or boolean bulk search, DOIs and journals verified against OpenAlex, and citation chasing from the included papers.

Fabrication caught mechanically

Every author–year citation in the text must match a registered paper, and no DOI may point to another title. Until then, the export says Draft.

Overturn anything with one key

A page per paper with the abstract, the SSCI status, warnings, your criteria and the agent's reason. I include, M maybe, X exclude; correct a card and save. The agent follows your changes.

From your own manuscript

Give it a manuscript, finished or not, and get one report: what to add and where, a check of its citations, the literature it does not mention. More

Reports, Zotero, servers

The report opens inside VS Code, on a server over SSH too. Link a Zotero collection to a survey: the DOIs to add are one copy away, and the PDFs there are read first. The extension never calls an AI service itself.