I've been using NotebookLM heavily for research and got tired of manually hunting down and adding sources. So I wrote a system prompt that hands the whole process off to Claude.
When you give it a topic, Claude starts by creating the notebook and drafting a structured research plan for your approval — organized into thematic phases and prioritizing academic and institutional sources (arXiv, PubMed, government reports, technical standards) over generic web content. It validates every URL before adding it, fetching and inspecting each one to catch silent 404s, paywalls, and login walls that NotebookLM would otherwise silently accept.
State is persisted across sessions using notes inside the notebook itself, so when Claude hits its session limit you just start a new conversation, paste the notebook URL, and it picks up where it left off. When the notebook is complete, Claude writes a full _REPORT note documenting every source added, skipped, or recommended.
Full prompt and setup instructions are on GitHub: github.com/stablediffusiontrainer-cmd/notebooklm-research-skill
Happy to answer questions about how it works or how I built it.
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