Stanford Quietly Open-Sourced a Research Method: 4 Prompts That Make Claude Perform Like a PhD

Most people use Claude like a search box. Ask a question, glance at the answer, close the tab.

They’ve never turned on its most powerful feature.

Stanford developed a research methodology called STORM. In peer-reviewed experiments, articles produced with it were 25% more organized than the next best method. Open source, free, and almost nobody knows about it—yet you can run the same logic in Claude using just 4 prompts.

No software installation needed. No GitHub. No configuration required. Just copy and paste.

In 5 minutes, your understanding of a topic will surpass someone who spent days reading materials.

Here’s the complete method.

Phase 1: What Is STORM Anyway?

STORM stands for Synthesis of Topic Outlines through Retrieval and Multi-perspective Question Asking, published by the Stanford OVAL Lab at NAACL 2024.

The online version is available at storm.genie.stanford.edu. It’s free and requires no registration. Enter a topic and watch it write a full article with citations right there.

There’s a 12-minute official explainer video on YouTube (search “STORM by Stanford”)—worth watching once.

The complete source code is hosted at github.com/stanford-oval/storm, under the MIT license, with 29k+ stars. You can also run it on your own machine.

But here’s the real secret: you don’t need to install anything.

Stanford’s method is fundamentally a way of thinking. You can run the exact same thought process in Claude using 4 copy-paste prompts.

The rest of this article is those 4 prompts.

Phase 2: Why a Single Prompt Is Never Enough

When you ask Claude “Tell me about X,” you always get the majority perspective. The most common framework. The most superficial consensus.

What you miss:

• Practitioners who deal with X every day.
• Skeptics who think the whole field is heading in the wrong direction.
• Economists who follow the money.
• Historians who have seen similar patterns before.
• Academics who have actually read the papers.

These five voices see completely different things.

This is how PhD research works. They don’t ask one question; they ask five.

Stanford’s paper demonstrated this with data: articles built from multiple perspectives are 25% more organized and 10% broader in coverage than single-prompt methods. That’s the entire breakthrough of STORM—multi-perspective questioning captures blind spots a single prompt can never see.

PhD-level research typically requires 40 to 60 hours of reading. Most people don’t have that time. STORM compressed it once. These 4 prompts compress it again. 5 minutes total.

Phase 3: Prompt 1—Multi-Perspective Scan

This is the core of the method.

Paste this directly into Claude and replace 【your topic】 with the subject you want to research.

I need to research 【your topic】.

Please simulate 5 different expert perspectives analyzing this topic:

1. The Practitioner: Deals with it daily. What are the practical realities academics miss? What real-world considerations are typically overlooked?

2. The Academic: Has researched this domain for years. What does peer-reviewed evidence actually say? Where does the evidence contradict popular opinion?

3. The Skeptic: Believes the mainstream view is wrong. What is the strongest counterargument? What evidence do proponents conveniently ignore?

4. The Economist: Tracks the flow of money. Who profits from the current narrative? What financial incentives shape this research?

5. The Historian: Has seen similar patterns before. What historical precedents exist for this? What can the ultimate outcomes of those precedents teach us?

For each perspective, provide:

• Their core stance in 2 sentences
• The strongest evidence supporting their stance
• One thing this perspective reveals that no other perspective can

What you get: 5 distinct interpretations of the same topic. The Practitioner sees what the Academic misses, the Skeptic challenges the Practitioner’s assumptions, the Economist uncovers the incentives the Academic ignores, and the Historian provides the time dimension the Economist overlooks.

60 seconds of work captures what a single prompt can never find.

Phase 4: Prompt 2—The Contradiction Map

Now ask Claude to find where the 5 voices disagree.

Where they disagree is where the truth hides.

Based on the 5 perspectives above, create a “contradiction map”:

1. Which perspectives are in direct opposition? List each pair of conflicts along with their specific claims.

2. Which perspective has the strongest evidence? Which is weakest? Why?

3. If answering one question could resolve the biggest contradiction, what would that question be?

4. What facts do all 5 perspectives agree on? (This is usually the truth. What even opponents acknowledge is most reliable.)

5. What topics are not mentioned by any perspective? (This is the blind spot of the entire field. Often the most valuable finding.)

What you get: A map showing exactly where experts disagree and why.

Most people skip this step. But this is the line that separates surface-level understanding from true expertise.

If all 5 perspectives agree on something, it’s probably true. If no perspective discusses something, you just found the field’s blind spot.

Phase 5: Prompt 3—Synthesis Briefing

Have Claude synthesize everything into a research briefing.

Synthesize the 5 perspectives and the contradiction map into a research briefing:

1. One-paragraph summary: Explain this topic to a CEO who has 60 seconds but needs details, not headlines.

2. 5 Key Findings: The most important things I now know, ranked by reliability. For each, note which perspectives support and which challenge it.

3. Hidden Connections: A non-obvious relationship between findings that only becomes visible when viewing all 5 perspectives together.

4. Actionable Insights: Based on all the evidence, what should someone in the role of 【your role】 specifically do differently? Be concrete.

5. Frontier Question: If we could answer this one question, it would completely change our understanding of this topic—what is it?

What you get: A briefing no single expert could write alone. It covers every angle, highlights all contradictions, grades reliability, and ends with a specific action.

This is what a PhD student produces in 48 hours. You get it in 90 seconds.

Phase 6: Prompt 4—Peer Review

STORM has a known weakness. Stanford’s own researchers identified it—the system doesn’t self-criticize. Source bias and fact misassociation can sneak in.

This prompt plugs that hole—make Claude grade its own work.

Now perform a peer review of the research briefing you just wrote:

1. Confidence Scores: Rate each of the 5 key findings on a scale of 1-10 (reliability), explaining the rationale for each score.

2. Weakest Link: Which claim are you least confident about? What specific information would be needed to verify it?

3. Bias Check: Which perspective might have been over-weighted in the synthesis? Did one voice dominate the others?

4. Missing Perspective: Is there a 6th perspective that, if added, would change the conclusions?

5. Overall Grade: If a Stanford professor reviewed this briefing, what grade would they give it and why? What would they ask you to revise?

What you get: An honest review of your own research. Which claims hold up, which don’t, what angles were missed, and what biases are present.

Real peer review takes months. You get through it in 60 seconds.

Phase 7: The 5-Minute Workflow

Minute 1: Run Prompt 1. Get 5 expert perspectives.

Minutes 2-3: Run Prompt 2. Get a contradiction map.

Minutes 3-4: Run Prompt 3. Get a research briefing.

Minute 5: Run Prompt 4. Know what’s credible and what isn’t.

Total time: 5 minutes. Output: A multi-perspective briefing + contradiction analysis + synthesis judgment + one specific action + one reliability rating.

A PhD student producing work of equivalent quality manually would need 40 to 60 hours. Not because they’re slow—because “reading from 5 angles, mapping contradictions, synthesizing, and self-criticizing” is genuinely a 40-hour task for a single human brain.

Phase 8: 7 Scenarios to Start Using Today

1. Before writing any article or report. Run the 4 prompts. Your draft will cover angles others never even considered.

2. Before major business decisions. Get all 5 perspectives. The Practitioner tells you what works in reality, the Skeptic tells you where it will fail, the Economist tells you where the money ends up.

3. Before an interview. Spend 5 minutes researching the target company from 5 angles. The Practitioner’s perspective gives you language that resonates with insiders; the Skeptic’s gives you sharp questions that uncover the truth. Walk into the room better prepared than anyone else in it.

4. Before investing. Bull case, bear case, historical precedent, incentive chains, academic evidence—all in 5 minutes. The contradiction map shows you where the real risk is hidden.

5. Before learning a new skill. Map the entire field from 5 angles. The Practitioner tells you what to learn first, the Academic explains the underlying principles, the Skeptic points out what’s overhyped. You skip all the noise.

6. Before negotiation. Study your counterpart from 5 perspectives. Understand their incentives, weaknesses, and past behaviors. You walk in with a structural advantage.

7. Before any presentation. Run STORM on your topic. Your slides will answer audience questions before they’re asked. Your Q&A will feel effortless.

Phase 9: How We Made It a Daily Tool

After reading the four steps above, you might think: pasting 4 prompts every time is a bit tedious.

Our workstation (JumpX) runs Hermes Agent, and we’ve packaged this method into a skill. When researching a new topic, one command runs the whole thing:

hermes chat -q “use storm-research to research: Is a small local inference model worth investing in for startups in 2026” -s storm-research

Hermes chains the 4 steps within a single session and outputs the result directly to a markdown file. That’s about 5x faster than manual copy-paste.

If you want this skill, leave a comment.

The real key: Don’t skip Phase 4 (Peer Review).

This is the step people most want to skip—you have conclusions from the first 3 steps, who wants another round of criticism? But this is precisely the step that Stanford’s paper explicitly identifies as “critical for patching the weaknesses of the STORM system.” Skipping it degrades your work back into a “fake multi-perspective” prompt chain.

The value of a tool isn’t to do your work for you; it’s to keep you from cutting corners.

The Persona Block: Who This Method Is For

You’re someone who reads. You ask hard questions. You don’t want a 200-word summary that sounds smart but says nothing.

You want to truly understand something. Fast, sourced, as thorough as a Stanford graduate student—but without paying six years of tuition.

If that’s you, bookmark this article. Use these 4 prompts. See the difference for yourself.

The Uncomfortable Truth

Here’s something nobody wants to say out loud.

Stanford’s team published this method in 2024. The paper was peer-reviewed. The code is open source. The online tool is free. The entire method is compressed into 4 prompts. Almost nobody is using it.

We are in an 18-month window. People who learn to use AI for genuine research will crush those who don’t, in terms of thinking quality. Not because they’re smarter—they’re running 5-perspective scans, contradiction maps, synthesis briefings, and peer reviews, while others are still reading the first Google result.

In 18 months, this entire workflow will be built into every tool by default. The advantage will disappear.

Today, it’s still an open secret.

Pick the topic you most need to research. Open Claude. Paste Prompt 1.

5 minutes from now, your understanding of that topic will surpass someone who spent days reading materials.

The prompts are above. The method is Stanford-validated. The rest is up to you.

Editor’s Note: This article is translated and adapted from “The Stanford STORM Method: How to Make Claude Research Like a PhD in Minutes” (2026-06) by Nav Toor (@heynavtoor) published on X. The 4 prompts are a Chinese adaptation of Nav’s original—preserving the question structure and logic of the original (5 perspectives / 5 questions for the contradiction map / 5 outputs for synthesis / 5 checks for peer review), rewritten in idiomatic Chinese short sentences, with English originals provided when technical terms first appear. We (JumpX) have also packaged this method into a reusable skill, storm-research, for Hermes Agent for daily research. The STORM paper (Shao et al., NAACL 2024) and Stanford’s official implementation are listed in the footer card and acknowledgments.

Acknowledgments & Sources:

• Original Author: Nav Toor (@heynavtoor)
• STORM Paper: Shao et al., “Assisting in Writing Wikipedia-like Articles From Scratch with Large Language Models”, NAACL 2024
• Stanford Official Implementation: stanford-oval/storm (GitHub, MIT License)
• Online Demo: storm.genie.stanford.edu (Free, no registration required)
• Hermes Agent: An open-source agent framework by Nous Research