literature-review-tools

literature-review-tools is a skill for Claude Code from brycewang-stanford/lit-review-agent-tools. It costs 288 tokens per session (3,605 once invoked), scanned A, original, CC0-1.0.

A catalog and launcher for open-source AI tools that support every stage of a literature review, from finding papers to checking citations and writing. A literature review is a structured summary and analysis of existing research.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to find papers, retrieve PDFs, screen studies, extract information, compare findings, check citations, map paper relationships, and draft research writing.
Why use it?
It helps you choose an appropriate research tool without searching through many separate projects. It can also install and run selected tools or handle one-off paper lookups.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin. Also seen: mentions Claude Code; mentions Codex; built for cline.

Needs its repository: it runs a file that does not travel with it, so clone the repository first. The line is python3 scripts/resolve_oa.py --from-json ./corpus/results.json --outdir ./corpus.

Part of the lit-review-agent-tools plugin — 1 skill shipped together

Good fit Use it to find papers, retrieve PDFs, screen studies, extract information, compare findings, check citations, map paper relationships, and draft research writing.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install

Getting it into your agent

It runs from inside its repository, so the clone comes first — what it calls does not travel with the file alone.

Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/brycewang-stanford/lit-review-agent-tools
agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/brycewang-stanford/lit-review-agent-tools/literature-review-tools

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install lit-review-agent-tools, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 1 skill.

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-tools

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/brycewang-stanford/lit-review-agent-tools/literature-review-tools/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/brycewang-stanford/lit-review-agent-tools/literature-review-tools)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/brycewang-stanford/lit-review-agent-tools/literature-review-tools"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/brycewang-stanford/lit-review-agent-tools/literature-review-tools/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-tools

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/brycewang-stanford/lit-review-agent-tools/literature-review-tools"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/brycewang-stanford/lit-review-agent-tools/literature-review-tools.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 288 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,605 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.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00288 $0.03605
Opus 5 $0.00144 $0.01802
Sonnet 5 $0.00058 $0.00721
Haiku 4.5 $0.00029 $0.00361

Measured 12d ago against content hash c692ff66b5ae, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

literature-review-tools 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 12d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 6 executable files (scripts/fetch_arxiv.py, scripts/fetch_openalex.py, scripts/fetch_papers.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.

Makes network callslowCapability

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

call the API directly (`WebFetch`/`curl`). [`reference/apis/`](reference/apis/) has a
skills/literature-review-tools/SKILL.md · 182 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 182 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Literature Review Tools — Select & Run

A curated, use-case-organized catalog of the strongest open-source AI tools for literature review — plus a launcher that actually installs and runs the top ones. Covers: end-to-end research agents, deep-research / auto-survey generators, autonomous "idea→paper" systems, citation-backed RAG over PDFs, PRISMA screening, MCP servers, Zotero/Obsidian integrations, PDF→structured extraction, citation graphs, and paper-writing / peer-review assistants.

Full source of truth (README, always current star counts): https://github.com/brycewang-stanford/lit-review-agent-tools

Three modes

  • Look up — user wants the literature itself: "find papers on X", "get me the PDF for this DOI", "does this citation exist", "what does PubMed have since 2022". Answer it directly — no install, no key. Start with reference/apis/README.md for one-off lookups, or run the bundled papers-fetch / oa-resolve scripts for anything corpus-sized.
  • Recommend — user asks "what should I use to …". Route with the tables below; cite the catalog for details.
  • Run — user asks to install / run / use a specific tool ("turn this PDF into Markdown with MinerU", "ask PaperQA2 about these papers", "set up the arXiv MCP server"). Drive scripts/litrun.py via Bash — do not hand the user raw pip commands to copy.

Mode 1 is the cheap default. Do not send someone to install PyTorch when they asked for five papers and a PDF.

Look up mode — search without installing anything

Two bundled scripts, both standard-library only: no venv, no pip, no API key. Run them straight (python3 scripts/fetch_papers.py …) or through the launcher.

# 1. search six indexes at once, deduplicated by DOI
python3 scripts/fetch_papers.py --query "active learning for screening" \
    --sources openalex,crossref,semanticscholar,pubmed,europepmc,arxiv \
    --max 15 --dedup-titles --outdir ./corpus

# 2. turn those DOIs into full text you may legally read
python3 scripts/resolve_oa.py --from-json ./corpus/results.json --outdir ./corpus

Read the full file on GitHub · 182 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 · 182 lines · 288 tokens per session scan A c692ff66b5ae

Subscribe to this mod's changes

literature-review-tools is a skill published in the GitHub repository brycewang-stanford/lit-review-agent-tools (16 stars, last pushed 5d ago), licensed CC0-1.0. It adds 288 tokens to every session and 3,605 once invoked, about $0.0014 per session on Opus 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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