---
name: prior-art-search
description: Establishing whether an idea is new, and finding the work that already did it before you build.
when_to_use: You are checking novelty before proposing or building something.
tags: [research, search]
---

# Assume it has been done, and go looking

The default hypothesis for any idea is that someone published it. Searching to
confirm novelty is a different activity from searching to find prior work, and
only the second one is honest.

## Search the mechanism, not your name for it

Your framing is unlikely to match the literature's. Decompose into the
mechanism and search that:

> "agent memory that remembers what it already read"
>   → deduplication, seen-set, incremental corpus, novelty detection,
>     continual retrieval

Three or four vocabularies, each searched separately. A single-phrase search
returning nothing is evidence about your phrasing, not about the field.

## Follow citations in both directions

- **Backwards**: the related-work section of the closest paper you find is a
  curated survey someone else already did.
- **Forwards**: who cites it. This is where the field's response lives — a
  strong result from two years ago that nobody cites was probably not
  reproducible, and that is worth knowing before you build on it.

Two hops in each direction from one well-chosen paper covers a field faster than
any keyword sweep.

## The negative result is the deliverable

If the search finds it has been done, say so plainly and stop. That is a
successful search that saved the build. The failure mode is a search that
concludes "novel" because the searcher wanted to build it.

## Record the search, not just the conclusion

Which terms, which databases, which date range, and what was found. A novelty
claim without its search is unfalsifiable, and six months later nobody can tell
whether the field moved or the search was thin.