Skip to main content
GuidesCore Guides

Prompting Fundamentals

Core frameworks for reliable research prompting.

RA
Research Atlas Team
Updated February 5, 2026

Editorial Policy

  • Guides are curated by the Research Atlas editorial team and revised when workflows, policies, or tooling materially change.
  • Factual claims should be traceable to source documents listed in each guide's Sources section.
  • Generative outputs are treated as drafts and require researcher verification before use in manuscripts or protocols.

COSTAR#

Context, Objective, Style, Tone, Audience, Response. Best for conceptual tasks, writing, and role-based synthesis.

TIDD-EC#

Task, Instructions, Do, Don’t, Examples, Content. Best for technical or data-processing tasks to reduce variance.

Parameter Tuning#

  • Low temperature (0–0.2) for factual, deterministic tasks.
  • Higher temperature for brainstorming only.
  • Lower top-p/top-k to reduce wandering logic.

Sources

  • AI in research report (Prompting Fundamentals)