The Literature Scout Agent: Systematic Paper Search

Mon, 08 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Literature Scout’s job sounds simple: find papers. In practice, it is the most consequential agent on your team. If the Scout misses papers, the rest of the team never sees them. Everything downstream is incomplete.

This post is about building a Scout that is exhaustive, systematic, and reliable.

The Scout’s challenge

A typical researcher manually searches:

Google Scholar: "evacuation behavior"
Google Scholar: "disaster evacuation"
Google Scholar: "agent-based evacuation"

Then stops, satisfied they have found “the papers.” But they have missed:

Literature Search on Mohammad Movahedi

The Literature Scout Agent: Systematic Paper Search

The Scout’s challenge