Student Vault: A Research Workspace

A research workflow becomes easier to examine when its questions, evidence, and decisions have a place to live.

The student vault gives research courses and study groups a local workspace. It contains plain Markdown notes you can edit in Obsidian or another text editor, with worksheets for developing prompts, checking synthesis, and designing an agent team. The systematic-review course is one teaching sequence you can adapt.

Download the student vault (ZIP, 33.8 KB)

Released 6 September 2026. Version 2026-09-06.6. SHA-256 4a625b8fa5d0ce8517a0b58ed95556cb8d9a3540dfe6a225ce841107433df214.

Editorial pass after an end-to-end read: defines an account before asking for one, puts the initial account before the first prompt, gives individual reading only its own section, aligns marker strings, and lists the links that break when the fictional records are removed. Previous releases remain available.

Open your vault

1. Download and unzip the folder somewhere you keep your own research work.
2. In Obsidian's vault switcher, choose Open folder as vault and select the extracted folder.
3. Open Home.md, then follow START-HERE.md.
4. Copy a template into your working notes before filling it in. Keep the original available for your next task.

The starter works with Obsidian's built-in features. You can read the notes and work through the human part of each exercise before connecting an AI tool. The Obsidian guide covers the wider research setup; the quick-start checklist helps you choose the next tool to add.

Set up with your AI agent

Download the skill below, or expand Read and copy the setup skill and use its Copy button. Paste the full text into your agent, or attach the file if your agent supports attachments. Say whether you are an instructor, a student following a course, or working independently, and provide any course brief you have. Agents with file and network access can download and prepare the workspace; chat-only agents can guide you through those steps.

The same file is included under skills/research-memex-student-vault/SKILL.md in the vault. It works as instructions in a conversation; persistent skill installation depends on your agent and is optional.

Download SKILL.md

For instructors, the skill helps draft a course brief, choose supplements by their teaching purpose, and record what students need to revisit after a change. For students, it follows the supplied brief and keeps unresolved questions in notes/course-questions.md: which version applies, how to access a reading, whether a tool or upload is allowed, or which work needs revision. It drafts questions for you to share with your instructor. A new public starter does not replace your course's instructions.

Follow an exercise

The worksheets leave room for your question, the evidence you used, the output you received, and the decision you made after checking it. If your group has a completed notes/course-brief.md, follow its chosen question, input set, and working mode. If you are enrolled in a course and that brief is missing or unclear, ask the instructor before choosing assignment materials. Independent learners can use the fictional practice below; students may try it separately as optional practice while awaiting clarification.

For the default exercise, start with practice/README.md. Its short records describe a fictional service team trying a new work process. Each record has an identifier so you can trace a claim back to the sentence that supports it. The records include disagreement and gaps; your task is to preserve those where the evidence does not settle them.

These constructed records are an exercise in checking claims. They are not published studies or evidence about a real organization. After the first exercise, repeat it with a small set of papers you are entitled to use and compare what changes.

Readings and practice

readings/README.md explains how to add your own literature and use the accompanying bibliography. Keep PDFs in your own library and link your notes to them. Course-only readings are supplied separately by the instructor.

The practice set is sufficient to try the worksheets. The methods readings below are optional references for developing a real review; follow their publisher or repository links for access.

• Page and colleagues (2021), The PRISMA 2020 statement: a reporting guideline for systematic reviews.
• Tranfield, Denyer, and Smart (2003), Towards a Methodology for Developing Evidence-Informed Management Knowledge by Means of Systematic Review: a methodological starting point for management research.
• Braun and Clarke (2006), Using thematic analysis in psychology: a reference for the choices involved in thematic analysis.

For a worked teaching sequence, see Session 3. Your course can select different exemplars using the guidance below. A citation points you to a reading; its full text is not included in the download.

Adapt it for your course

Start with INSTRUCTOR-GUIDE.md in the download. Copy templates/course-brief.md to notes/course-brief.md, fill it in, and give that copy to your learners. It records the learning objective, selected materials, working mode, schedule, access arrangements, and expected outputs. Session 2, 3, and 4 are labels from the example course; keep the progression from reading to comparison to workflow design when fitting the exercises into your own timetable.

Choose supplements by the work they help students do:

The guide explains how to replace unavailable material and prepare a reading list with assigned passages and access routes. No course-only reading is required; instructors supply any such material separately. Instructors decide which materials students may share with a selected tool; reading access alone does not settle that decision.

Choose a mode that fits the group: students can use their own approved AI interface, inspect an instructor-provided AI output with its prompt and input record, exchange independent accounts with human peers, or work by individual reading only. The same worksheets support evidence checks and workflow design in each mode. Peer work is labelled as human practice, and unperformed model runs remain unperformed. Individuals without a second account can complete their own evidence checks and mark the comparison as not performed.

There is no required campus platform, paid subscription, or plugin. The local notes and fictional exercise can be used offline after downloading; live websites and AI services require access separately. The course brief leaves tool choice, language or format adaptations, collaboration, assessment, and submission expectations for the instructor to specify.

Keep your work when updating

The copy you download is a dated snapshot. Its RELEASE.md identifies the version, and UPDATES.md explains how to move to a newer one.

Download a new release into a separate folder. Read its change notes, compare any templates you have adapted, and copy over only what you need. Keep your notes, annotations, literature, and saved conversations in your working vault. Replacing that whole folder would replace your work too.

Setup and model guidance live on the website, where they can be reviewed as the tools change. Links in the vault take you to those maintained guides. Your saved prompts and outputs remain a record of the tools you actually used.

@misc{docs-case-studies-systematic-reviews-student-vault-2026,
  author = {Xule Lin},
  title = {Student Vault: A Research Workspace},
  year = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://research-memex.org/docs/case-studies/systematic-reviews/student-vault}},
  note = {ORCID: 0000-0001-7885-4194}
}