literature-review

literature-review is a skill for Claude Code from AI-4-Phi/PhilLit. It costs 40 tokens per session (7,677 once invoked), scanned A, original, Apache-2.0.

A workflow for producing research-based literature reviews in philosophy. It coordinates topic breakdown, source searching, citation records, and synthesis across six phases.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to research a philosophy proposal, create BibTeX references, coordinate specialist agents, and track progress in a review directory.
Why use it?
It organizes a complex review into repeatable stages and emphasizes verified sources, coverage of major debates, and accurate citations.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: allowed-tools in frontmatter. Also seen: reads .claude/ paths; mentions subagents; mentions Claude Code.

Part of the phillit plugin — 3 skills, 4 agents, 4 hooks shipped together

Good fit Use it to research a philosophy proposal, create BibTeX references, coordinate specialist agents, and track progress in a review directory.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/ai-4-phi/phillit/literature-review
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.

Any agent
npx skills add AI-4-Phi/PhilLit --skill literature-review
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/AI-4-Phi/PhilLit

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install phillit, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 3 skills, 4 agents, 4 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 literature-review

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ai-4-phi/phillit/literature-review/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/ai-4-phi/phillit/literature-review)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/ai-4-phi/phillit/literature-review"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ai-4-phi/phillit/literature-review/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-review

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/ai-4-phi/phillit/literature-review"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ai-4-phi/phillit/literature-review.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 40 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 7,677 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. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector warn 7 Sept 2026
SkillSpector: 2 findings, up to high

These are SkillSpector’s own severities. On a checked sample its high-severity flags on skills were ~96% false positives — a documented command, a public API, a “never do X” rule — so we show them as a caution to read, not a verdict. Why →

  • high Privilege Escalation · line 111
    Code accesses credential files (SSH keys, AWS credentials, etc.). This could indicate credential theft attempts.
    Fix: Remove references to credential paths. Use environment variables or secrets managers. For docs, use placeholder paths (e.g., /path/to/config). Never load .env or token files in production code paths.
  • medium Excessive Agency · line 154
    Skill enables autonomous high-impact decisions without human-in-the-loop verification. Critical operations (destructive commands, financial transactions, data deletion) should require explicit user confirmation.
    Fix: Add human-in-the-loop confirmation for destructive, irreversible, or high-impact operations. Never auto-execute commands that modify files, send data, or alter system state.
How audits are shown
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 $0.00040 $0.07677
Opus 5 $0.00020 $0.03839
Sonnet 5 $0.00008 $0.01535
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00768

Measured yesterday against content hash d6dfba4ec8e4, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

literature-review 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 yesterday.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 15 executable files (scripts/assemble_review.py, scripts/bib_fields.py, scripts/check_evidence.py, …), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

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.

skills/literature-review/SKILL.md · 551 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 551 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Literature Review Workflow

Overview

This skill coordinates the production of a focused, insight-driven, rigorous, and accurate literature review for philosophy research proposals. The skill coordinates specialized subagents using the Agent tool to execute a structured 6-phase workflow.

Objectives (priority order)

  1. Accurate — Only cite verified papers; never fabricate references
  2. Comprehensive — Cover all major positions and key debates
  3. Rigorous and concise — Analytical depth, tight prose; balanced presentation of positions
  4. Reproducible — Structured workflow, standard BibTeX output, Chicago author-date citations

Quality over speed; use full context as needed (do not optimize for token savings).

Critical: Task List Management

ALWAYS maintain a todo list and a task-progress.md file to enable resume across conversations.

Once the review directory reviews/[project-short-name]/ is established (Phase 1, step 7), create the tracker at reviews/[project-short-name]/task-progress.md. The first setup steps of Phase 1 (environment check, resume detection, mode choice) run untracked because the review directory does not exist yet. The tracker template:

# Literature Review Progress Tracker

**Research Topic**: [topic]
**Started**: [timestamp]
**Last Updated**: [timestamp]

## Progress Status

- [ ] Phase 1: Verify environment and determine execution mode
- [ ] Phase 2: Structure literature review domains
- [ ] Phase 3: Research [N] domains in parallel
- [ ] Phase 4: Outline synthesis review across domains
- [ ] Phase 5: Write review for each section in parallel
- [ ] Phase 6: Assemble final review files and move intermediate files

## Completed Tasks

[timestamp] Phase 1: Created `lit-review-plan.md` ([N] domains)

## Current Task

[Current phase and task]

## Next Steps

[Numbered list of next actions]

Update task-progress.md after EVERY completed phase in the workflow.

Workflow Architecture

Strictly follow this workflow consisting of six distinct phases:

Read the full file on GitHub · 551 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. yesterday Changed · +8 lines d6dfba4ec8e4
  2. 8d ago Changed · +11 lines 62a4d0b5198f
  3. 12d ago First seen · 532 lines · 40 tokens per session scan A 9791423a44ce

Subscribe to this mod's changes

literature-review is a skill published in the GitHub repository AI-4-Phi/PhilLit (42 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 40 tokens to every session and 7,677 once invoked, about $0.0002 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.

Related

Other skills, from other repositories

life-meaning

A guide for reflecting on personal purpose, effort, suffering, and mortality when life feels empty or directionless.

kangarooking/cangjie-skill · 118 tokens

rational-buddhism

A way to examine spiritual, supernatural, or other difficult-to-test claims using skepticism, personal testing, and scientific standards.

kangarooking/cangjie-skill · 166 tokens

academic-paper-composer

Systematic writing framework for philosophy and interdisciplinary academic papers from optimized outline to submission-ready manuscript. Use when users want to: (1) write a paper from a detailed outline, (2) ensure quality control during writing, (3) maintain consistency across chapters, (4) prepare a submission-ready…

lishix520/academic-paper-skills · 135 tokens

academic-paper-strategist

Systematic strategic planning framework for philosophy and interdisciplinary academic papers targeting preprint platforms (PhilArchive, arXiv, PhilSci-Archive). Use when users want to: (1) plan a paper on a specific topic, (2) identify research gaps and assess originality, (3) develop optimized paper outlines, (4)…

lishix520/academic-paper-skills · 201 tokens

worldview-synthesis

This skill should be used when someone wants to articulate, explore, or document their personal worldview, values, or philosophy. Triggers on "articulate my values", "figure out what I believe", "document my philosophy", "write a manifesto", "define my leadership philosophy", "explore my beliefs". Surfaces beliefs…

2389-research/worldview-synthesis · 83 tokens

maoxuan

A Chinese-language thinking framework based on Mao Zedong’s writings. It helps analyze practical situations by identifying the main conflict, the facts, and the available actions.

Numberreport/maoxuan · 192 tokens