Agent skill · research science · sickn33
papers-skill
Skill for academic research workflows: search Semantic Scholar (200M+ papers), inspect citations, download arXiv PDFs, and extract PDF text. Bundles a self-contained Python CLI.
Why this skill is useful
Adds a self-contained Python CLI for academic research workflows, enabling literature searches, citation tracking, and PDF text extraction that the AI cannot generate on its own.
What it needs
Requires arxiv, httpx, pymupdf installed locally. About 5k tokens when loaded. Last updated 2026-08-07. 44,571 stars on the source repository.
What this skill does
Papers Skill Overview Papers Skill turns a coding agent into a literature-research assistant. It orchestrates a bundled Python CLI (scripts/papers.py) that hits the free Semantic Scholar and arXiv APIs, downloads arXiv PDFs, and extracts text with PyMuPDF. The agent decides which subcommand to invoke and how to combine results into a literature scan, a deep read of one paper, an impact analysis, or a reading list. This skill is the Skill-mode port of the papers-mcp MCP server by the same author. Both projects share the same feature set; this one ships as a Claude Code plugin so it can be installed with a single command and needs no long-running MCP process. When to Use This Skill Use when the user asks to search academic papers by topic, author, or venue. Use when the user names a specific paper (by DOI, arXiv ID, or title) and wants metadata, the abstract, the TL;DR, or its reference list. Use when the user wants to find work that cites a known paper (impact analysis, follow-up tracking). Use when the user wants to download an arXiv PDF and have it summarized. Use when the user asks to build a reading list around a topic. Do Not Use This Skill When The user wants paywalled non-arXiv full text. This skill cannot bypass publisher paywalls; it can only fetch arXiv PDFs and metadata everywhere. The user wants OCR over scanned PDFs. PyMuPDF extracts embedded text only; scanned image-PDFs return the fallback message and need a separate OCR step. The user wants real-time citation alerts or RSS-style watching. This skill is request-driven. How It Works Step 1: Verify dependencies Three Python packages are required. The skill should check once per session, using the same interpreter to import-check and install so the dependency check and install target stay in sync: If python is not on PATH, fall back to py (Windows launcher) or the absolute interpreter path — and remember to invoke pip via the same interpreter, e.g. py -m pip install httpx arxiv PyMuPDF. …
How to use it
Reference it in AdaL, Claude Code, Cursor or any coding agent — nothing to install:
@skills sickn33/papers-skill