search-lit

search-lit is a skill for Claude Code from Aperivue/medsci-skills. It costs 52 tokens per session (6,124 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A medical research literature-search and citation tool that checks sources in PubMed, Semantic Scholar, bioRxiv, and medRxiv. bioRxiv and medRxiv are online repositories for research papers shared before formal journal review.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to find research papers, discover related articles, look up citation details, and create verified BibTeX entries for reference managers.
Why use it?
It reduces the risk of using incorrect or invented references by verifying each citation against a live database.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: ${CLAUDE_SKILL_DIR} variable. Also seen: model in frontmatter.

Part of the medsci-literature plugin — 6 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it to find research papers, discover related articles, look up citation details, and create verified BibTeX entries for reference managers.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/aperivue/medsci-skills/search-lit
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 search-lit
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.

agentmods badge for search-lit

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/aperivue/medsci-skills/search-lit/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/aperivue/medsci-skills/search-lit)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/aperivue/medsci-skills/search-lit"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/aperivue/medsci-skills/search-lit/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 search-lit

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/aperivue/medsci-skills/search-lit"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/aperivue/medsci-skills/search-lit.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 52 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 6,124 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 medium

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 →

  • medium Data Exfiltration · line 40
    Data is being sent to an external URL. This could be legitimate telemetry or data exfiltration. Manual review is recommended.
    Fix: Verify the destination URL is trusted and necessary. Remove or replace with documented APIs. Ensure no secrets, tokens, or PII are transmitted.
  • medium Data Exfiltration · line 248
    Data is being sent to an external URL. This could be legitimate telemetry or data exfiltration. Manual review is recommended.
    Fix: Verify the destination URL is trusted and necessary. Remove or replace with documented APIs. Ensure no secrets, tokens, or PII are transmitted.
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 $0.00052 $0.06124
Opus 5 $0.00026 $0.03062
Sonnet 5 $0.00010 $0.01225
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00612

Measured 6d ago against content hash f16110416385, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

search-lit 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 6d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 6 executable files (references/parse_pubmed.py, references/pubmed_eutils.sh, references/snowball_challenge/verify.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/search-lit/SKILL.md · 515 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 515 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Literature Search Skill

You are assisting a medical researcher with literature searches and citation management for medical research papers. Every reference you produce must be verified against a live database -- never generate citations from memory alone.

Communication Rules

  • Communicate with the user in their preferred language.
  • All citation content (titles, abstracts, BibTeX) in English.
  • Medical terminology is always in English.

Key Directories

  • BibTeX output: User-specified directory (default: current working directory)
  • Manuscript workspace: determined by the user or the calling skill

Search Tools: MCP (Primary) + E-utilities (Fallback)

Primary: MCP Tools (Claude.ai Remote)

Database MCP Tool Purpose
PubMed mcp__claude_ai_PubMed__search_articles Search by query, MeSH terms
PubMed mcp__claude_ai_PubMed__get_article_metadata Full metadata for a PMID
PubMed mcp__claude_ai_PubMed__find_related_articles Related articles for a PMID
PubMed mcp__claude_ai_PubMed__lookup_article_by_citation Verify a citation
PubMed mcp__claude_ai_PubMed__convert_article_ids Convert between PMID/DOI/PMCID
Semantic Scholar mcp__claude_ai_Scholar_Gateway__semanticSearch Semantic search across all fields
bioRxiv/medRxiv mcp__claude_ai_bioRxiv__search_preprints Search preprint servers
bioRxiv/medRxiv mcp__claude_ai_bioRxiv__get_preprint Full preprint metadata
CrossRef WebFetch with https://api.crossref.org/works/{DOI} DOI verification

Fallback: NCBI E-utilities (Direct API via Bash)

When PubMed MCP is unavailable (session timeout, "MCP session has been terminated" error, or "No such tool available" error), fall back to NCBI E-utilities via bundled scripts.

Detection: If any mcp__claude_ai_PubMed__* call returns an error containing "terminated", "not found", "not available", or "not connected", switch ALL subsequent PubMed calls in this session to E-utilities. Do not retry MCP after a disconnect — it will not recover within the same conversation.

Read the full file on GitHub · 515 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. 6d ago Changed · +7 lines f16110416385
  2. 12d ago First seen · 508 lines · 52 tokens per session scan A 7b3b355e1cf8

Subscribe to this mod's changes

search-lit is a skill published in the GitHub repository Aperivue/medsci-skills (292 stars, last pushed 4d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 52 tokens to every session and 6,124 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.

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