find-paper-references

find-paper-references is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from aipoch/medical-research-skills. It costs 55 tokens per session (3,113 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

An academic writing tool that reads a paper in Markdown, finds statements needing citations, and searches PubMed for relevant research articles. PubMed is a public database of biomedical and health research papers.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to locate references for claims about health data, biological mechanisms, and previous research in a scientific paper.
Why use it?
It reduces the manual work of finding supporting studies and marking where citations belong. It also gives the writer a candidate reference list to review.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

Good fit Use it to locate references for claims about health data, biological mechanisms, and previous research in a scientific paper.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/aipoch/medical-research-skills/find-paper-references
About the project

Medical Research Agent Skills is a library of agent instructions for medical and biomedical research, covering evidence analysis, study protocol design, data analysis, and academic writing. Researchers use it to guide compatible coding agents through common scientific workflows. The catalogue contains many of the library's skills and commands.

aipoch/medical-research-skills · 1,860 stars · on GitHub · aipoch.com

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 aipoch/medical-research-skills --skill find-paper-references
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/aipoch/medical-research-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 find-paper-references

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/aipoch/medical-research-skills/find-paper-references/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/aipoch/medical-research-skills/find-paper-references)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/aipoch/medical-research-skills/find-paper-references"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/aipoch/medical-research-skills/find-paper-references/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 find-paper-references

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/aipoch/medical-research-skills/find-paper-references"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/aipoch/medical-research-skills/find-paper-references.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 55 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,113 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: 1 finding, 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 282
    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.
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 $0.00055 $0.03113
Opus 5 $0.00028 $0.01556
Sonnet 5 $0.00011 $0.00623
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00311

Measured 9d ago against content hash a498f92d3500, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

find-paper-references 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 9d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 3 executable files (scripts/batch_search.py, scripts/convert_to_docx.py, scripts/remap_refs.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.

scientific-skills/Academic Writing/find-paper-references/SKILL.md · 300 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 300 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Source: https://github.com/aipoch/medical-research-skills

find-paper-references — Academic Paper PubMed Reference Finder

Tools

Scripts are located in the scripts/ subdirectory of this skill:

  • batch_search.pyMain entry point: accepts all queries at once, parallel search, batch esummary fetch, typical runtime 10-20s
  • remap_refs.py — Converts [PMID:XXXXXXXX] markers to [1][2] numbering and generates formal references (not called by this skill — handled by subsequent endnote/zotero skill)
  • convert_to_docx.py — Converts .md to .docx (not called by this skill)

Skill Boundary

┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│  find-paper-references                              │
│  ─────────────────────────────────────────────────  │
│  Step 0-3: Identify knowledge points → Build PubMed search JSON │
│  Step 4:   batch_search.py batch search                         │
│  Step 5:   Select articles → Insert [PMID:xxxxxxxx] markers     │
│  Step 6:   Write to .md file                                    │
│  Step 7:   Generate _candidates.md candidate reference list     │
│  Step 8:   Prompt user to choose EndNote / Zotero to continue   │
│  ──────────────── Workflow ends ──────────────────────────────── │
│                                                     │
│  Formatting → format-references-endnote (EndNote)              │
│            → format-references-zotero (Zotero)                 │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

Workflow (Execute in Order)

Step 0: Ask for NCBI API Key

Before starting any search, check and ask:

Do you have an NCBI API key? If so, search speed increases from 3 req/s to 10 req/s.
No worries if not — just skip and we'll proceed.
  • User provides key: Before all script calls in this session, execute:
    # Windows
    $env:NCBI_API_KEY = "user_provided_key"
    # Mac/Linux
    export NCBI_API_KEY="user_provided_key"
    
    Then continue the workflow normally. Key is valid only for this session, not written to any file.

Read the full file on GitHub · 300 lines

Files

What ships with it

6 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

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. 9d ago First seen · 300 lines · 55 tokens per session scan A a498f92d3500

Subscribe to this mod's changes

find-paper-references is a skill published in the GitHub repository aipoch/medical-research-skills (1,860 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 55 tokens to every session and 3,113 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 2026-09-03.

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