biorxiv-search

biorxiv-search is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from fmschulz/omics-skills. It costs 45 tokens per session (2,225 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A search tool for bioRxiv, a website where scientists share biology research papers before formal journal review. It searches recent preprint records and their titles, summaries, and author details.

In plain words
What is it for?
Finding biology preprints, scanning a date range, matching keywords, checking DOIs, and building a shortlist of authors.
Why use it?
The official service does not offer broad keyword search, so the tool fetches a limited date range and filters the results locally. This helps find recent work that may not yet appear in standard literature indexes.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for Claude Code and Codex: shipped in a Claude Code plugin, but also agents/openai.yaml present.

Part of the omics-skills plugin — 34 skills, 4 agents shipped together

Good fit Finding biology preprints, scanning a date range, matching keywords, checking DOIs, and building a shortlist of authors.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/fmschulz/omics-skills/biorxiv-search
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 fmschulz/omics-skills --skill biorxiv-search
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/fmschulz/omics-skills

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install omics-skills, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 34 skills, 4 agents.

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 biorxiv-search

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

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/fmschulz/omics-skills/biorxiv-search"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/fmschulz/omics-skills/biorxiv-search.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 45 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,225 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: 1 finding, 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 45
    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 $0.00045 $0.02225
Opus 5 $0.00023 $0.01112
Sonnet 5 $0.00009 $0.00445
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00222

Measured 6d ago against content hash e6ea1759f69d, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

biorxiv-search 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 1 executable file (scripts/search.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.

skills/biorxiv-search/SKILL.md · 188 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 188 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Search bioRxiv through its official API for recent-preprint discovery, date-range scans, DOI lookups, author shortlisting, and local keyword filtering over title, abstract, and author metadata.

Instructions

  1. Prefer this skill when the request is about bioRxiv-native preprints, recent biology submissions, or preprint metadata that may lag in PubMed, PMC, or Crossref.
  2. Use the bundled CLI:
    • In this repository: skills/biorxiv-search/scripts/search
    • After installation: ~/.agents/skills/biorxiv-search/scripts/search
  3. The official bioRxiv API does not provide a general server-side keyword search endpoint.
    • Use the CLI to fetch metadata from a bounded recent window or explicit date range, then filter locally.
  4. When keywords are provided, search title, abstract, and authors by default.
    • If the user wants abstract-only matching, pass --fields abstract.
  5. Keep the search window bounded.
    • Use --days N for recent scans or --start-date YYYY-MM-DD --end-date YYYY-MM-DD for explicit intervals.
    • If you omit the interval, the CLI defaults to the most recent 30 days.
    • The CLI converts --days N into an explicit date range before calling the API so pagination stays predictable.
  6. Use --category <name> when the topic should stay narrow.
    • The API accepts the bioRxiv category as a query parameter such as cell_biology, genomics, or neuroscience.
  7. Use --author for author-specific requests.
    • By default, consider both the supplied full-name form and an abbreviated-first-name form, for example --author "Peter Nugent" and --author "P. Nugent".
    • Do not silently merge these in the final answer. Report full-name matches and abbreviated-first-name matches in separate groups because initials can be ambiguous.
    • The CLI normalizes both given-name-first and API-style Surname, F. M. forms. Prefer separate passes or a local partition of returned records by the literal authors text when you need clean buckets.
  8. The API currently returns up to 30 records per page.
    • The API orders an interval from oldest to newest. The CLI reads count and total, starts at the newest page, and scans backward.
    • Increase --scan-limit when a broad query needs more of the interval inspected.
  9. By default, the CLI collapses multiple versions of the same preprint and keeps the latest version for each DOI.
    • Use --all-versions only when version-by-version output matters.
  10. Treat the API output as discovery metadata.
  • If exact citation details or the latest abstract-page presentation matter, verify the shortlisted candidates on bioRxiv or the DOI landing page before finalizing the answer.
  1. If the user wants peer-reviewed biomedical literature or PMC full text rather than bioRxiv preprints, use polars-dovmed instead.
  2. The CLI retries HTTP 429 and transient 5xx responses with bounded exponential backoff. Output records the retry policy, the exact latest-version rule, and separate match groups for every requested author form; initial-only groups remain explicitly ambiguous.

Read the full file on GitHub · 188 lines

Files

What ships with it

3 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

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 e6ea1759f69d
  2. 12d ago First seen · 188 lines · 45 tokens per session scan A 5962ae88c0fb

Subscribe to this mod's changes

biorxiv-search is a skill published in the GitHub repository fmschulz/omics-skills (7 stars, last pushed 6d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 45 tokens to every session and 2,225 once invoked, about $0.0002 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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