Agent skill · research science · mvanhorn
pp-shodhganga
Structured, scriptable, agent-native access to India's national reservoir of PhD theses — the machine API Shodhganga never shipped. Trigger phrases: `search shodhganga`, `find indian phd theses on`, `thesis metadata for handle`, `theses supervised by`, `university research profile`, `use shodhganga`, `run shodhganga`.
Why this skill is useful
Adds a CLI tool that enables structured access to a unique dataset of Indian PhD theses, allowing for offline analysis and local database mirroring.
What it needs
Requires shodhganga-pp-cli installed locally. About 11k tokens when loaded. Last updated 2026-08-06. 1,890 stars on the source repository.
What this skill does
<!-- GENERATED FILE — DO NOT EDIT. This file is a verbatim mirror of library/productivity/shodhganga/SKILL.md, regenerated post-merge by tools/generate-skills/. Hand-edits here are silently overwritten on the next regen. Edit the library/ source instead. See the repository agent guide, section "Generated artifacts: registry.json, cli-skills/". --> Shodhganga — Printing Press CLI Prerequisites: Install the CLI This skill drives the shodhganga-pp-cli binary. You must verify the CLI is installed before invoking any command from this skill. If it is missing, install it first: 1. Install via the Printing Press installer. It defaults binaries to $HOME/.local/bin on macOS/Linux and %LOCALAPPDATA%\Programs\PrintingPress\bin on Windows: 2. Verify: shodhganga-pp-cli --version 3. Ensure the reported install directory is on $PATH for the agent/runtime that will invoke this skill. If the npx install fails (no Node, offline, etc.), fall back to a direct Go install (requires Go 1.26.6 or newer). This installs into $GOPATH/bin (default $HOME/go/bin), so add that directory to $PATH instead: If --version reports "command not found" after install, the runtime cannot see the binary directory on $PATH. Do not proceed with skill commands until verification succeeds. Shodhganga hosts 600,000+ Indian doctoral theses from 900+ universities but exposes no OAI, REST, or OpenSearch API — only HTML. This CLI turns every thesis into a structured Dublin Core record you can search and export as JSON, then mirror a research area into a local database for instant offline analysis with guide-centric indexes, university profiles, and subject trends the web UI can't produce. When to Use This CLI Use this CLI when an agent or script needs structured metadata about Indian PhD/MPhil theses — literature reviews, supervisor or university research profiles, subject-trend analysis, or building a citable corpus. It is the only programmatic path to Shodhganga, whose web UI returns HTML with no API. …
How to use it
Reference it in AdaL, Claude Code, Cursor or any coding agent — nothing to install:
@skills mvanhorn/pp-shodhganga