literature-survey

literature-survey is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from ai4s-research/ai4s-skills. It costs 66 tokens per session (1,979 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A procedure for producing a comprehensive research survey as a PDF with LaTeX source, citations, figures, and a classified literature table. A literature survey summarizes and organizes published research on a topic.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when you need a substantial survey of a research area with dozens of citations, topic-specific figures, and a final quality review.
Why use it?
It provides a complete workflow for finding real references, organizing coverage, creating figures, controlling document layout, and checking quality.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Which agent this was written for is unclear — built for aider. Also seen: mentions Claude Code; mentions Codex; built for aider.

Good fit Use it when you need a substantial survey of a research area with dozens of citations, topic-specific figures, and a final quality review.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/ai4s-research/ai4s-skills/literature-survey
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 ai4s-research/ai4s-skills --skill literature-survey
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/ai4s-research/ai4s-skills

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

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-survey

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ai4s-research/ai4s-skills/literature-survey/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/ai4s-research/ai4s-skills/literature-survey)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/ai4s-research/ai4s-skills/literature-survey"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ai4s-research/ai4s-skills/literature-survey/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-survey

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/ai4s-research/ai4s-skills/literature-survey"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ai4s-research/ai4s-skills/literature-survey.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 66 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,979 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 pass 7 Sept 2026
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 $0.00066 $0.01979
Opus 5 $0.00033 $0.00989
Sonnet 5 $0.00013 $0.00396
Haiku 4.5 $0.00007 $0.00198

Measured 12d ago against content hash fc0699464f14, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

literature-survey 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 12d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 2 executable files (templates/survey/check_bibliography_freshness.py, templates/survey/compile.sh), 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-survey/SKILL.md · 160 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 160 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Literature Survey

Overview

End-to-end literature survey builder. Single stage, full quality from the start. The agent (Claude Code / Cursor / Aider / Codex / …) does the entire build using its own tools (WebFetch, WebSearch, Write, Bash). This SKILL is procedure + reference playbooks + LaTeX template — no Python runtime, no LLM SDK.

The substantive work is decomposed into reference playbooks under references/:

Reference Topic
references/00-incremental-execution.md how to actually do this without losing work: batch sizes, persistence, resume — read first
references/01-bibliography-expansion.md grow bibliography.bib to 60+ real entries (100+ recommended) via WebFetch (no memory)
references/02-survey-figures.md taxonomy / timeline / coverage-matrix / area-map figures
references/03-survey-section-playbook.md per-section structure for survey-shaped papers
references/04-layout-discipline.md tables, figures, floats, cross-refs, author + disclosure footnote
references/05-quality-gate.md self-check before delivery

Read the relevant reference before writing, not after. The full pass does not fit in a single turn — references/00-incremental-execution.md is the only execution mode that completes.

When to Use

  • User asks for a "survey" / "review" on a specific topic.
  • User has a research topic and wants a structured map of the field with citations.
  • User needs background reading curated for a thesis chapter or grant section.

When NOT to Use

  • User wants original research with experiments → paper-writer.
  • User wants only an outline / topic exploration → research-explorer.
  • User wants experiment code → experiment-suite.
  • Topic is too broad (e.g., "all of AI") — narrow it before starting.

Workflow

Step 1 — Understand the topic and scope

Confirm with the user:

  • Topic — specific research area (e.g., "federated learning in healthcare"). If too broad, narrow it first.
  • Scope — broad survey of a field vs. focused review of a sub-area.
  • Citation budget — minimum 60 unique entries; aim for 100+ (push higher for a broad survey).
  • Language — default Chinese in conversation; the LaTeX paper is English unless requested otherwise.

Read the full file on GitHub · 160 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. 12d ago First seen · 160 lines · 66 tokens per session scan A fc0699464f14

Subscribe to this mod's changes

literature-survey is a skill published in the GitHub repository ai4s-research/ai4s-skills (225 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 66 tokens to every session and 1,979 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 2026-08-30.

Related

Other skills, from other repositories

traceability-review

Use when the user asks to review, verify, or audit a report, manuscript, or analysis in the workspace for traceability — resolving citations, flagging numbers with no source, and checking figures against the code that generated them. Emits a structured review block the app renders as reviewer findings. Verifies…

ai4s-research/open-science · 72 tokens

pydicom

Use pydicom to read, inspect, write, transform, and safely preflight local DICOM datasets and pixel data. Applies to DICOM metadata, transfer syntaxes, compression plugins, frames, private elements, JSON, and bounded de-identification review.

K-Dense-AI/scientific-agent-skills · 56 tokens

markitdown

Convert heterogeneous documents and selected URIs to Markdown with Microsoft MarkItDown for text analysis, search, and LLM/RAG ingestion. Covers safe local conversion, streams, Office/PDF/data formats, batch workflows, plugins, vision OCR, Azure extraction, and the official MCP server.

K-Dense-AI/scientific-agent-skills · 61 tokens

open-notebook

Self-hosted, open-source alternative to Google NotebookLM for AI-powered research and document analysis. Use when organizing research materials into notebooks, ingesting diverse content sources (PDFs, videos, audio, web pages, Office documents), generating AI-powered notes and summaries, creating multi-speaker…

K-Dense-AI/scientific-agent-skills · 123 tokens

pptx-posters

Create and audit editable scientific posters in macro-free PowerPoint (.pptx) from author-approved local content and assets. Use when the requested deliverable is a PowerPoint research/conference poster and exact physical, printer, accessibility, provenance, and package-security checks are required.

K-Dense-AI/scientific-agent-skills · 59 tokens

liteparse

Local document and PDF parsing that returns spatial text with bounding boxes. Use for extracting text from PDFs, DOCX, Office files, and images; running OCR on scans; producing layout-preserved JSON for RAG; batch-ingesting folders of papers; or rendering pages to PNG for multimodal agents. Distinguishing capabilities…

K-Dense-AI/scientific-agent-skills · 86 tokens