A tool for copying research references from a BibTeX file, a common plain-text bibliography format, into Zotero and Obsidian. Zotero manages citation records, while Obsidian stores linked research notes.

Use it after a literature search or with an existing .bib file to register references, create literature notes, and extract broader concept notes when enough papers are available.

It reduces repeated manual entry and keeps reference records and literature notes aligned. It can also find shared ideas across a growing collection of papers.

lit-sync — Skill for Claude Code by Aperivue/medsci-skills

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 Aperivue/medsci-skills --skill lit-sync

Clone the repo

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Aperivue/medsci-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install medsci-literature, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 6 skills.

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.

README.md

[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/aperivue/medsci-skills/lit-sync/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/aperivue/medsci-skills/lit-sync)

Your own site

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/aperivue/medsci-skills/lit-sync"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/aperivue/medsci-skills/lit-sync/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.

Your own site · 80×15

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/aperivue/medsci-skills/lit-sync"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/aperivue/medsci-skills/lit-sync.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 4,950 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.

Security scan A 1 finding. 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.

Model	Per session	Once invoked
Fable 5.1	$0.00066	$0.04950
Opus 5.5	$0.00026	$0.01980
Sonnet 5.5	$0.00013	$0.00990
Haiku 4.5	$0.00007	$0.00495

Measured 24d ago against content hash 45ba031478d6, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-10-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

lit-sync scanned grade A with 1 finding 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 24d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 4 executable files (scripts/check_citekey_provenance.py, tests/citekey_provenance_challenge_selftest.sh, tests/citekey_provenance_challenge.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.

Makes network callslowCapability

Not a fault in itself. Listed so you know the mod talks to something, and to what.

curl -s -m 5 -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code}" \

skills/lit-sync/SKILL.md · 421 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 421 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Literature Sync: Zotero + Obsidian Pipeline

Takes the .bib output of /search-lit (or any user-specified .bib file), synchronizes the references into the Zotero library and Obsidian literature notes, and extracts cross-cutting concept notes once enough literature notes accumulate.

Prerequisites

Project owner only. Collaborators consume the committed manuscript/_src/refs.bib snapshot read-only. If the current user is a collaborator (no Zotero access per SSOT.yaml reference_manager.required_for), abort with instructions to flag [@NEW:topic] placeholders in the manuscript and notify the owner.
Zotero desktop 7.x + Better BibTeX plugin, with Better BibTeX "Keep updated" auto-export configured to <project>/manuscript/_src/refs.bib.
Zotero MCP server (if not connected, skip Phase 2; auto-export still refreshes once Zotero is reopened).
Obsidian CLI or direct file writing to the vault; vault path from the user's environment (e.g., $OBSIDIAN_VAULT).

Artifact Contract

/lit-sync is the sole writer of manuscript/_src/refs.bib (via the Better BibTeX auto-export trigger), references/zotero_collection.json, and references/fulltext_retrieval.json (Phase 2.7). NEVER write refs.bib directly — not even to compensate for a missing Zotero connection — because only Better BibTeX's export keeps it in step with the library; if auto-export is broken, fix the Zotero setup. Direct hand edits to refs.bib are drift — revert on sight.

Phase 1: Parse BibTeX

Parse the user-specified .bib file, or the references/library.bib just produced by /search-lit, with regex. Extract per entry: citekey, doi, pmid, title, authors (first + last minimum), journal, year, and volume/number/pages if present. Log any parse failures and skip those entries. All bibliographic data in later phases comes from these entries or from API responses.

A parsed citekey is not yet a library key: /search-lit candidate keys (Kim_2024_Validation) are provisional, and Better BibTeX mints the real key when Phase 2 adds the item. Never compose a key; Step 3.2 §Citekey provenance says where the note's key comes from.

Read the full file on GitHub · 421 lines

Files

What ships with it

9 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.

24d ago Changed · +4 lines 45ba031478d6
26d ago Changed · -153 lines · +25 tokens per session a4d9ebe9fd09
27d ago Changed 805a99cd2787
1mo ago Changed · +9 lines d41481e90c1b
1mo ago First seen · 561 lines · 41 tokens per session scan A b0fc43eed00b

Subscribe to this mod's changes

lit-sync is a skill published in the GitHub repository Aperivue/medsci-skills (352 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 66 tokens to every session and 4,950 once invoked, about $0.0003 per session on Opus 5.5. A static security scan graded it A with 1 finding (makes network calls). No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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