{
  "id": "zero-shot-chain-of-thought",
  "code": "PTL-0025",
  "term": "Zero-shot Chain-of-Thought",
  "aliases": [
    "zero-shot CoT",
    "let's think step by step"
  ],
  "category": "reasoning",
  "definition": "Zero-shot chain-of-thought prompting triggers step-by-step reasoning without examples by appending a cue such as \"Let's think step by step\" to the question.",
  "description": "Kojima et al. showed this single phrase produced large accuracy gains on arithmetic and logic benchmarks. The method uses a second prompt to extract the final answer from the generated reasoning.",
  "example": null,
  "broader": [
    "chain-of-thought"
  ],
  "narrower": [
    "plan-and-solve-prompting"
  ],
  "related": [
    "zero-shot-prompting"
  ],
  "introduced": 2022,
  "sources": [
    {
      "title": "Large Language Models are Zero-Shot Reasoners",
      "authors": "Kojima et al.",
      "year": 2022,
      "url": "https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.11916"
    }
  ],
  "url": "https://protologue.com/t/zero-shot-chain-of-thought/",
  "citation": "Protologue. (2026). Zero-shot Chain-of-Thought. In Protologue: A Taxonomy of Prompting and LLM Techniques (v1.0.0, PTL-0025). https://protologue.com/t/zero-shot-chain-of-thought/"
}