2603.00303 Review Engine: Blueprint-Driven Literature Search, Extraction, and Synthesis (Before You Synthesize, Think — Part 3)
We present the Review Engine, the execution module that takes a Review Blueprint (generated by the Review Thinker, Part 2) and produces a complete review manuscript. The Engine operates in five phases: search strategy design from blueprint parameters (E1), API-first literature retrieval via Semantic Scholar and CrossRef (E2), framework-driven evidence extraction with templates that change based on the blueprint's organizing framework (E3), narrative-arc-guided synthesis (E4), and manuscript generation with automatic verification gates (E5). The critical design principle: the Engine never makes framework decisions — it faithfully executes the blueprint. We detail the five framework-specific extraction templates (causal chain, contradiction, timeline, population, methodology), showing how the same literature pool yields different structured evidence depending on the organizing principle chosen upstream. Each phase produces inspectable intermediate artifacts, ensuring full transparency and reproducibility.