import-papers

A workflow for importing research-paper PDFs from research/dump/ into a paper library. It reads paper details and adds matching BibTeX citations, a standard format for storing bibliography data.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it in checkouts with the expected research folders to process PDFs, create citations, and move the papers into the library.
Why use it?
It removes the repeated work of reading paper metadata, creating citation keys, and updating a bibliography by hand.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/djrhails/dotfiles/import-papers
Any agent
npx skills add DJRHails/dotfiles --skill import-papers
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/DJRHails/dotfiles

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 76 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 765 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
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 $0.00076 $0.00765
Opus 5 $0.00038 $0.00382
Sonnet 5 $0.00015 $0.00153
Haiku 4.5 $0.00008 $0.00076

Measured 2d ago against content hash af783a3d8a6f, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

import-papers 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 2d ago.

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.

modules/agents/skills/import-papers/SKILL.md · 95 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 95 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Import Papers Skill

Process all PDFs in research/dump/, create bibtex entries, and move them to research/papers/.

Instructions

For each PDF in research/dump/:

  1. Extract metadata using pdftotext (first 30 lines only to avoid context overload):

    pdftotext "filename.pdf" - 2>&1 | head -30
    
  2. Identify:

    • Title (full, not truncated)
    • Authors (first few primary authors)
    • Year (infer from content or use the current year for recent papers)
    • Venue (if clearly stated: conference/journal)
  3. Generate citation key using format: firstauthorYEARkeyword

    • Use lowercase only
    • First author's last name
    • Year
    • One descriptive keyword from title
    • Examples: ren2015faster, choi2024neuromamba, park2024processing
  4. Create bibtex entry matching existing format in research/papers.bib:

    @article{citationkey,
     author = {Author One and Author Two and Author Three},
     ejournal = {arXiv},
     title = {Full Paper Title},
     url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/XXXX.XXXXX},
     year = {YYYY}
    }
    

    Use @inproceedings if it's a conference paper (like NIPS, ICML, etc.) with:

    @inproceedings{citationkey,
     author = {Authors},
     booktitle = {Conference Name},
     title = {Title},
     year = {YYYY}
    }
    
  5. Append to papers.bib:

    cat >> research/papers.bib << 'EOF'
    
    @article{citationkey,
     ...
    }
    EOF
    
  6. Move and rename PDF to research/papers/:

    mv "research/dump/original.pdf" "research/papers/citationkey.pdf"
    
  7. Handle duplicates: If two PDFs are identical (same title), keep only one.

  8. Verify after processing all files:

    • List moved files: ls -1 research/papers/ | tail -10
    • Check dump is empty: ls -1 research/dump/*.pdf 2>/dev/null || echo "empty"
  9. Run bibify.py to update the changelog and sync with Google Drive:

    ./bin/bibify.py
    

    If the output contains Missing notes for, run bibify a second time — newly uploaded papers need a second pass to generate their note stubs.

Read the full file on GitHub · 95 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. 2d ago First seen · 95 lines · 76 tokens per session scan A af783a3d8a6f

Subscribe to this mod's changes

import-papers is a skill published in the GitHub repository DJRHails/dotfiles (2 stars, last pushed 7d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 76 tokens to every session and 765 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.

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