surveying-literature

surveying-literature is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from chgagne/claude-skills-research. It costs 81 tokens per session (2,115 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A research tool for finding related academic papers and organizing a research field. It works from a draft paper or a topic, including papers hosted on services such as bioRxiv, a site where scientists share research before formal publication.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to find papers to cite, test a novelty claim, map major lines of work, and arrange research chronologically.
Why use it?
It helps reveal important work a draft may have missed and check whether an idea is genuinely new. It also makes a large body of research easier to understand.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one. Also seen: reads .claude/ paths; positional $N argument.

Good fit Use it to find papers to cite, test a novelty claim, map major lines of work, and arrange research chronologically.

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

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 surveying-literature

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

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/chgagne/claude-skills-research/surveying-literature"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/chgagne/claude-skills-research/surveying-literature.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 81 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,115 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.
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 $0.00081 $0.02115
Opus 5 $0.00041 $0.01058
Sonnet 5 $0.00016 $0.00423
Haiku 4.5 $0.00008 $0.00212

Measured 7d ago against content hash c6c0890bb9fa, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

surveying-literature 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 7d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 14 executable files (assets/run-survey.py, assets/survey/__init__.py, assets/survey/__main__.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.

surveying-literature/SKILL.md · 171 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 171 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Surveying Literature

Overview

Two modes over one retrieval layer.

Gap sweep — from a draft, find work it should have cited. Expands outward from the bibliography through the citation graph and searches the draft's own topic directly, then grades each candidate by how much it threatens the novelty claim.

Field map — from a topic, cluster the area into lines of work and order them chronologically.

The gap sweep is the one that changes papers. A reviewer who knows the area will name the omission in the first paragraph of their review; this finds it first.

Run it

# gap sweep
python3 ~/.claude/skills/surveying-literature/assets/run-survey.py . \
    --out review-assets/

# what the draft yields, without spending any API budget
python3 ~/.claude/skills/surveying-literature/assets/run-survey.py . --seeds-only

# field map
python3 ~/.claude/skills/surveying-literature/assets/run-survey.py . \
    --field-map "symbolic regression" --out review-assets/

Run by absolute path from the paper directory. Stdlib only — no install, no dependencies.

  • --max-per-seed N (default 20) results per lookup; --max-angles N (default 10) topical queries. Both bound cost.
  • --min-shared N (default 3) references two papers must share to cluster in field-map mode.
  • Exit code 2 means source coverage was degraded — see When a source is down.

Writes related-work-gaps-<date>.md + candidates.json, or lit-review-<date>.md.

Always run --seeds-only first. It makes no requests and shows exactly what the sweep will search for. If the angles look wrong, the results will be wrong, and you will have spent budget finding that out.

Where candidates come from

Four discovery paths, and the report names which one found each candidate:

Path What it reaches
backward what the cited papers cite — intellectual ancestors
forward what cites them — descendants
related the index's own similarity edge
topical direct search on the draft's title, abstract concepts and contributions

Read the full file on GitHub · 171 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. 7d ago Changed · +10 lines c6c0890bb9fa
  2. 12d ago First seen · 161 lines · 81 tokens per session scan A ef5529befc56

Subscribe to this mod's changes

surveying-literature is a skill published in the GitHub repository chgagne/claude-skills-research (4 stars, last pushed 7d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 81 tokens to every session and 2,115 once invoked, about $0.0004 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 2026-08-31.