firecrawl-research-papers

firecrawl-research-papers is a skill for Claude Code from firecrawl/firecrawl-workflows. It costs 153 tokens per session (1,611 once invoked), scanned A, original, ISC.

A workflow for finding and summarizing academic papers, whitepapers, PDFs, technical reports, and similar sources. It searches a paper index that includes sources such as PubMed, bioRxiv, medRxiv, and arXiv; bioRxiv and medRxiv are repositories for research preprints that have not completed journal peer review.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to create sourced literature reviews, compare studies, find related papers, verify statements in the body of a paper, and research clinical, drug, gene, disease, public-health, technical, or scientific questions.
Why use it?
It reduces the time needed to find relevant studies and check claims against the paper text. It is especially suited to biomedical, life-science, computer-science, physics, and mathematics topics.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin. Also seen: mentions subagents.

Part of the firecrawl-workflows plugin — 16 skills shipped together

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/firecrawl/firecrawl-workflows/firecrawl-research-papers
Any agent
npx skills add firecrawl/firecrawl-workflows --skill firecrawl-research-papers
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/firecrawl/firecrawl-workflows

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install firecrawl-workflows, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 16 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 firecrawl-research-papers

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/firecrawl/firecrawl-workflows/firecrawl-research-papers.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/firecrawl/firecrawl-workflows/firecrawl-research-papers)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/firecrawl/firecrawl-workflows/firecrawl-research-papers"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/firecrawl/firecrawl-workflows/firecrawl-research-papers.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 153 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,611 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 5.1 $0.00153 $0.01611
Opus 5 $0.00077 $0.00805
Sonnet 5 $0.00031 $0.00322
Haiku 4.5 $0.00015 $0.00161

Measured 6d ago against content hash e93996e2209a, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-06, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

firecrawl-research-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 6d 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.

Origin

Copies of this mod

1 near-identical copy found in the catalogue:

skills/firecrawl-research-papers/SKILL.md · 162 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 162 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Firecrawl Research Papers

Use this to create a sourced literature review.

Onboarding Interview

Infer the topic, source constraints, target count, and output format from context. If the topic is clear, proceed immediately.

Ask at most 1-3 concise questions only if blocked, such as the topic, target paper count, or required venue/date/method constraints.

Firecrawl Collection Plan

Use Firecrawl Research through the CLI, MCP, or equivalent Firecrawl tool surface as the primary path for paper discovery and verification. Fall back to general Firecrawl search and scrape for whitepapers, technical reports, research blogs, leaderboards, or facts outside the paper corpus.

What the paper index holds: paper abstracts, with full text reachable per paper. Its largest share is biomedical and life-science literature — PubMed journal articles plus bioRxiv and medRxiv preprints — so clinical, drug, gene, disease, epidemiology, and public-health questions are in scope. arXiv preprints cover computer science, physics, and mathematics. Coverage outside those sources is thinner, and the web tools below are the fallback there.

Core tools:

  • MCP: firecrawl_research_search_papers(query, k?) CLI: firecrawl research search-papers <query> [--k <number>] Semantic search over paper abstracts. Start here for most paper-finding queries, and retry with alternate framing when results are thin or too narrow.
  • MCP: firecrawl_research_related_papers(seed_ids, intent, mode?, k?) CLI: firecrawl research related-papers <seedIds...> --intent <intent> [--mode <similar|citers|references>] [--k <number>] Expand from strong seed papers into similar work, citing papers, or references. Use this to find the relevant paper family, not just the first matching result.
  • MCP: firecrawl_research_inspect_paper(id) CLI: firecrawl research inspect-paper <id> Fetch canonical metadata for a candidate paper: title, abstract, authors, categories, source ids, and dates.
  • MCP: firecrawl_research_read_paper(id, question) CLI: firecrawl research read-paper <id> --question <question> Verify a specific claim or constraint inside one paper, such as method, reported score, benchmark, affiliation, comparison, or limitation.
  • MCP: firecrawl_search(query) / firecrawl_scrape(url) CLI: firecrawl search <query> / firecrawl scrape <url> Use for web-only context: benchmark leaderboards, rankings, reports, whitepapers, research blogs, and source pages outside the paper index.

Read the full file on GitHub · 162 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 First seen · 162 lines · 153 tokens per session scan A e93996e2209a

Subscribe to this mod's changes

firecrawl-research-papers is a skill published in the GitHub repository firecrawl/firecrawl-workflows (151 stars, last pushed 15d ago), licensed ISC. It adds 153 tokens to every session and 1,611 once invoked, about $0.0008 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.

Related

Other skills, from other repositories