researcher

researcher is an agent for Claude Code from roomi-fields/paper-trail. It costs 58 tokens per session (1,315 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A research sub-agent that searches many academic sources and returns a structured list of possible papers. It can filter searches by field, year range, and keywords, with optional NotebookLM and web-search support.

In plain words
What is it for?
Finding papers on a research topic, gathering candidate references, filtering academic results, and preparing sources for a state-of-the-art literature review.
Why use it?
It removes the need to perform broad literature searches manually or fill the main agent's context with search details. The results can be passed to a later stage for reference checking.

Agent for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin. Also seen: reads .claude/ paths; mentions subagents.

Part of the paper-trail plugin — 6 skills, 22 commands, 6 agents, 3 hooks shipped together

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add agents/roomi-fields/paper-trail/researcher
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/roomi-fields/paper-trail

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install paper-trail, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 6 skills, 22 commands, 6 agents, 3 hooks.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for researcher

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/agents/roomi-fields/paper-trail/researcher.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/agents/roomi-fields/paper-trail/researcher)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/agents/roomi-fields/paper-trail/researcher"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/agents/roomi-fields/paper-trail/researcher.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 58 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 1,315 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00058 $0.01315
Opus 5 $0.00029 $0.00658
Sonnet 5 $0.00012 $0.00263
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00131

Measured 6d ago against content hash 88ce4d58c8dc, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-06, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

researcher scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 6d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

agents/researcher.md · 153 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 153 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Sub-agent : researcher

Role

Perform exhaustive multi-source academic search for a given topic. Returns a structured list of candidate references that sota-writer phase A will then push into the registry as candidate state for acquisition.

Input contract

topic: "Petri nets in music notation"        # required
domain: "computer-science"                    # optional (filters fieldsOfStudy)
year_range: [2010, 2026]                      # optional
max_candidates: 50                            # optional, default 50
extra_keywords: ["formal grammar", "MIDI"]    # optional
include_notebooklm: false                     # optional, default false
include_websearch: false                      # optional, default false

What this agent does

Step 1 — Multi-source paper search (mandatory)

Invokes paper-search MCP across multiple platforms :

Question type Priority tool
General academic papers mcp__paper-search__search_papers (unified)
Recent preprints (CS, AI, math, physics) mcp__paper-search__search_arxiv
Cross-domain aggregator mcp__paper-search__search_openalex
Formal linguistics, NLP mcp__paper-search__search_semantic
Medical / biomedical mcp__paper-search__search_pubmed
French academic mcp__paper-search__search_hal
DOI lookup mcp__paper-search__get_crossref_paper_by_doi

Filters applied :

  • Relevance (abstract keyword match)
  • Year range
  • Citation count (preference for cited papers but don't exclude recent low-citation papers)

Step 2 — Local corpus search (if configured)

If mcp__rtfm__* MCP is configured for the project, query the local indexed corpus for additional matches not surfaced by remote APIs.

Step 3 — Books corpus (optional)

If include_notebooklm: true and mcp__notebooklm__* MCP is configured, query the books corpus via notebook_ask for chapters/sections relevant to the topic.

Step 4 — Web search complement (optional)

If include_websearch: true, complement with WebSearch for :

  • Course pages
  • Personal/lab pages
  • archive.org records
  • Conference proceedings not in S2/OpenAlex
  • Pre-publication tech reports

Read the full file on GitHub · 153 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 6d ago First seen · 153 lines · 58 tokens per session scan A 88ce4d58c8dc

Subscribe to this mod's changes

researcher is an agent published in the GitHub repository roomi-fields/paper-trail (5 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 58 tokens to every session and 1,315 once invoked, about $0.0003 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.

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