Theory Identification

Identify theoretical frameworks relevant to a research gap, providing a theoretical basis for mechanism extraction.

HARD-GATE

<HARD-GATE> Preconditions (all must hold before starting):

1. A clear research gap description exists (including domain, phenomenon, unanswered question)
2. Domain tags are provided (used to direct the literature scan)

Not satisfied → stop, return error: missing gap description or domain tags. </HARD-GATE>

Pipeline

1. Precheck: verify completeness of the gap description and domain tags
2. Literature scan: search for theoretical literature relevant to the gap (literature-engine + web-browsing)
3. Theory screening: keep theories directly or indirectly relevant to the gap (≥3, remove purely methodological literature)
4. Core claim extraction: distill a 1-2 sentence core_claim for each theory
5. Applicability assessment: assess each theory's explanatory power for the current gap (high/medium/low)
6. Output a structured theory list

Output Format

json
[
  {
    "name": "Theory Name",
    "source": "Author (Year) or canonical reference",
    "core_claim": "One-sentence summary of what the theory claims",
    "relevance": "Why this theory relates to the gap",
    "applicability": "high | medium | low"
  }
]

Minimum 3 entries, maximum 8 (sorted by applicability descending).

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Available SOPs

Optional, no fixed order; the final leaf is always a sop.

| SOP | When to use | | --- | --- | | hypothesis-formation-paper-overview | Import SOP: Quick paper scan, returns abstract and metadata (from literature-engine) | | hypothesis-formation-paper-search | Import SOP: Medium-depth literature search, AI summary report (from literature-engine) | | hypothesis-formation-web-search | Import SOP: quick web scan, discover URLs and snippets (from web-browsing) |

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