literature-sweep

literature-sweep is a command for Claude Code from mims-harvard/ToolUniverse. It costs 144 tokens per session (2,494 once invoked), scanned A, original, Apache-2.0.

A guided mini-review that searches several academic literature databases, then narrows the results to a small, structured reading list. It uses sources such as PubMed, a database of biomedical research, and arXiv, a repository for research papers often used in computing and physics.

In plain words
What is it for?
Finding and curating research on a specific question, such as biomedical, computing, physics, or other cross-disciplinary topics.
Why use it?
A raw search can produce too many irrelevant papers, while one database may miss useful work. This helps organize a more focused search across sources chosen for the topic.

Command for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: argument-hint in frontmatter.

Part of the tooluniverse plugin — 140 skills, 8 commands, 1 agent, 1 hook, 1 MCP server shipped together

Good fit Finding and curating research on a specific question, such as biomedical, computing, physics, or other cross-disciplinary topics.

Compare 6 commands from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add commands/mims-harvard/tooluniverse/literature-sweep
About the project

ToolUniverse is a collection of tools, interfaces, and supporting components for building AI systems that perform scientific work. It is for developers creating AI scientist agents that use APIs, databases, machine-learning tools, and domain-specific utilities. The catalogue includes skills, commands, an MCP server, an agent, and a hook for working with the ecosystem.

mims-harvard/ToolUniverse · 1,680 stars · on GitHub · aiscientist.tools

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.

Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/mims-harvard/ToolUniverse

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install tooluniverse, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 140 skills, 8 commands, 1 agent, 1 hook, 1 MCP server.

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 literature-sweep

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/commands/mims-harvard/tooluniverse/literature-sweep/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/commands/mims-harvard/tooluniverse/literature-sweep)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/commands/mims-harvard/tooluniverse/literature-sweep"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/commands/mims-harvard/tooluniverse/literature-sweep/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for literature-sweep

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/commands/mims-harvard/tooluniverse/literature-sweep"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/commands/mims-harvard/tooluniverse/literature-sweep.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 144 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 2,494 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
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 $0.00144 $0.02494
Opus 5 $0.00072 $0.01247
Sonnet 5 $0.00029 $0.00499
Haiku 4.5 $0.00014 $0.00249

Measured 11d ago against content hash cdcde6451cba, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-10, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

literature-sweep 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 11d 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.

plugin/commands/literature-sweep.md · 179 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 179 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Run a literature sweep on this topic: $ARGUMENTS

A raw PubMed_search dump is overwhelming and often noisy (many hits don't actually address the topic). Curate down to a small, high-quality reading list with structured metadata.

Process

1. Plan the query strategy

Decompose the topic into 1-3 search formulations. Different sources accept different syntax, so you'll often run the same idea multiple ways.

For "KRAS G12C inhibitor resistance mechanisms":

  • Strict: (KRAS[ti] OR sotorasib OR adagrasib) AND resistance
  • Broad: KRAS G12C resistance mechanism
  • Mechanism-focused: KRAS G12C bypass OR rebound

State the formulations in one line before searching.

2. Search several independent literature sources (adaptive by domain)

ToolUniverse exposes 15+ keyword-searchable literature indexes. Each maintains its own coverage, so running a topic across several catches papers any single one misses. Don't blindly fire all of them — that's slow and noisy. Pick the always-on CORE set, then add the domain rows that match the topic.

ALWAYS run (multi-field core — 4 indexes):

# PubMed (NIH; peer-reviewed biomedical, MeSH-indexed)
tu run PubMed_search_articles '{"query":"KRAS G12C resistance mechanism","limit":20}'

# EuropePMC (broader: clinical, agricultural, pharma + preprints via SRC:PPR)
tu run EuropePMC_search_articles '{"query":"KRAS G12C resistance mechanism","limit":20}'

# OpenAlex (250M+ works, every discipline; good cross-field recall)
tu run openalex_search_works '{"search":"KRAS G12C inhibitor resistance","per_page":20}'

# Semantic Scholar (AI-ranked citation graph; catches non-MeSH-indexed work)
tu run SemanticScholar_search_papers '{"query":"KRAS G12C inhibitor resistance","limit":20}'

THEN add domain-specific indexes when the topic matches:

Topic signal Add these sources Why
Biomedical / clinical / gene·drug·disease PMC_search_papers (full text), PubTator3_LiteratureSearch (entity & relation queries, e.g. relations:treat|@CHEMICAL_X|@DISEASE_Y) Full-text body hits + entity-normalized recall
Clinical practice / treatment guidelines PubMed_Guidelines_Search Filters to guideline / practice-guideline pub types
CS / ML / AI / algorithms ArXiv_search_papers, DBLP_search_publications arXiv preprints + CS bibliography (often not in PubMed)
Physics / HEP / astro InspireHEP_search_papers 1.6M+ particle/astro physics records
Broad / cross-disciplinary / hard-to-find Crossref_search_works, CORE_search_papers, DOAJ_search_articles, Fatcat_search_scholar DOI registry + open-access aggregators + Internet Archive Scholar
Need the very latest (preprints) EuropePMC_search_articles with SRC:PPR, OSF_search_preprints bioRxiv/medRxiv/PsyArXiv etc. before peer review
Datasets / code / supplementary outputs Figshare_search_articles, Zenodo_search_records Research data and software with citable DOIs

Read the full file on GitHub · 179 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. 11d ago First seen · 179 lines · 144 tokens per session scan A cdcde6451cba

Subscribe to this mod's changes

literature-sweep is a command published in the GitHub repository mims-harvard/ToolUniverse (1,680 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 144 tokens to every session and 2,494 once invoked, about $0.0007 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 2026-08-30.