Science Skills is a collection of add-ons that give AI agents structured instructions, scripts, and references for scientific research, including genomics, structural biology, cheminformatics, and literature search. Researchers use it to guide agents through specialized scientific tasks with information from databases and tools such as AlphaGenome, AFDB, and UniProt. The catalogue entries are individual skills from this collection.
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.
npx skills add google-deepmind/science-skills --skill literature_search_europepmcgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/google-deepmind/science-skillsWrote 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.
[](https://agentmods.dev/skills/google-deepmind/science-skills/literature_search_europepmc)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/google-deepmind/science-skills/literature_search_europepmc"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/google-deepmind/science-skills/literature_search_europepmc/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.
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/google-deepmind/science-skills/literature_search_europepmc"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/google-deepmind/science-skills/literature_search_europepmc.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>- NVIDIA SkillSpector warn
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 Prompt Injection · line 34 Subtle instructions detected that may alter agent decision-making or introduce hidden biases.Fix: Review content for implicit steering or bias. Ensure instructions are explicit and align with the skill's stated purpose.
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.
| Model | Per session | Once invoked |
|---|---|---|
| Fable 5.1 | $0.00039 | $0.02295 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00019 | $0.01148 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00008 | $0.00459 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00004 | $0.00230 |
Grade A, and why
literature-search-europepmc 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 13d 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.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 230 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Europe PMC Database
A skill for searching, downloading, and exploring open-access papers from Europe PMC — a comprehensive, free life-science literature database with over 43 million abstracts and 9 million full-text articles.
Prerequisites
uv: Read theuvskill and follow its Setup instructions to ensureuvis installed and on PATH.- User Notification: If .licenses/literature_search_europepmc_LICENSE.txt does not already exist in the workspace root directory then (1) prominently notify the user to check the terms at https://europepmc.org/ and to always check the license of the papers retrieved by the skill for any restrictions, then (2) create the file recording the notification text and timestamp.
Core Rules
- Open Access Only: This skill exclusively searches open-access content.
The script automatically appends
OPEN_ACCESS:yto every search query. Do NOT remove or override this filter. - NEVER run python3 or python3 -c directly: the system Python does not necessarily have all key dependencies. Do not attempt to pip install or create new venvs.
- Use the Wrapper: ALWAYS use the provided script rather than calling the API directly. The script handles rate limiting (1 req/s) and errors.
- Output Files: All subcommands require
--outputto write results to a file. Read the output file separately to avoid context overflow. - List Sources. If this skill is used, ensure this is mentioned in the output AND list the URLs of all papers that were used in producing the output.
Utility Scripts
All commands are subcommands of scripts/europepmc_api.py. Rate limiting and
retries are handled automatically.
1. Search (search)
Search Europe PMC by query. Supports DOI lookup, keyword search, author search, PMID lookup, and the full Europe PMC search syntax.
# Look up a paper by DOI
uv run scripts/europepmc_api.py search "DOI:10.1038/s41586-021-03819-2" --output result.json
# Keyword search
uv run scripts/europepmc_api.py search "CRISPR cancer" --max_results 5 --output results.json
# Author search
uv run scripts/europepmc_api.py search "AUTH:Jumper J" --max_results 10 --output results.json
# PMID lookup
uv run scripts/europepmc_api.py search "EXT_ID:34265844 AND SRC:MED" --output result.json
# Sorted by citations
uv run scripts/europepmc_api.py search "machine learning" \
--sort "CITED desc" --max_results 20 --output results.json
What ships with it
2 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.
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.
- 13d ago First seen · 230 lines · 39 tokens per session scan A 4582fcc3fa36
literature-search-europepmc is a skill published in the GitHub repository google-deepmind/science-skills (3,003 stars, last pushed 4d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 39 tokens to every session and 2,295 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 2026-08-30.
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