Agent skill · research science · google-deepmind
literature-search-arxiv
Search for scientific papers, preprints, and publications on arXiv. Extract metadata, abstracts, and download full-text PDFs or HTML versions of papers. Use when the user asks to find research papers, literature, or specific arXiv IDs.
Why this skill is useful
Adds specific utility scripts for searching and downloading papers from arXiv that the AI wouldn't reliably generate on its own.
What it needs
Requires uv installed locally. About 3k tokens when loaded. Last updated 2026-07-07. 2,648 stars on the source repository.
What this skill does
arXiv Search and Retrieval Prerequisites 1. uv: Read the uv skill and follow its Setup instructions to ensure uv is installed and on PATH. 2. User Notification: If .licenses/literaturesearcharxivLICENSE.txt does not already exist in the workspace root directory then (1) prominently notify the user to check the terms at https://info.arxiv.org/help/api/index.html and to always check the license of the papers retrieved by the skill for any restrictions, then (2) create the file recording the notification text and timestamp. Core Rules Terms of Use: You MUST respect arXiv's Terms of Use. Maximum 1 request every 3 seconds. The provided utility scripts handle rate limiting automatically. Always use these scripts rather than writing your own curl/python requests. If this skill is used, ensure this is mentioned in the output AND list the URLs of all papers that were used in producing the output. Utility Scripts 1. Search and Extract Metadata Search arXiv and return a clean JSON array of matching papers. Important: The tool outputs a large JSON result to stdout. Requesting 100+ results will produce a massive JSON that might exceed your context length. Limit --maxresults (e.g., 5-10) or paginate carefully using --start. Always redirect output to a file and parse it separately, otherwise terminal output will be truncated. Returned Metadata: JSON results include id, title, summary, published, authors, pdfurl, primarycategory, doi, journalref, and comment. Note: the doi field only contains DOI information in case the paper has an external DOI and if only an arXiv-issued DOI exists, this is DOI is not returned. Options: --query: Search string. See references/querysyntax.md for advanced syntax. --idlist: Comma-separated list of arXiv IDs to fetch directly (e.g., 1706.03762v5). --start: Pagination offset (default 0). --maxresults: Number of results to return (default 10). --sortby: relevance, lastUpdatedDate, or submittedDate. …
How to use it
Reference it in AdaL, Claude Code, Cursor or any coding agent — nothing to install:
@skills google-deepmind/literature_search_arxiv