papers-library

papers-library is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from grburgess/mindgap. It costs 117 tokens per session (1,569 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A workflow for turning a Papers or ReadCube reference library into a connected research knowledge graph. Papers and ReadCube are applications for collecting academic references.

In plain words
What is it for?
Reading BibTeX, RIS, or ReadCube database files, importing papers, linking related work, discovering new papers, and generating research or implementation ideas.
Why use it?
It helps preserve library structure, avoid duplicate entries, find related papers, and connect research sources to new ideas.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Part of the mindgap plugin — 6 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/grburgess/mindgap/papers-library
Any agent
npx skills add grburgess/mindgap --skill papers-library
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/grburgess/mindgap

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install mindgap, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 6 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 papers-library

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/grburgess/mindgap/papers-library.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/grburgess/mindgap/papers-library)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/grburgess/mindgap/papers-library"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/grburgess/mindgap/papers-library.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 117 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,569 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 $0.00117 $0.01569
Opus 5 $0.00059 $0.00785
Sonnet 5 $0.00023 $0.00314
Haiku 4.5 $0.00012 $0.00157

Measured 3d ago against content hash 554536830466, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

papers-library 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 3d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 6 executable files (scripts/github_repos.py, scripts/parse_refs.py, scripts/readcube_db.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.

mindgap-plugin/skills/papers-library/SKILL.md · 88 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 88 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

papers-library

Turn a Papers (papersapp.com / ReadCube) library into living graph structure: import → link → discover → ideate. Self-contained: a stdlib BibTeX/RIS parser ships with this skill; the only graph dependency is the bundled paper-to-mindmap ingest protocol.

1 · Get the library out of Papers

There is no public Papers API, so work from an export (BibTeX or RIS — both supported):

  • In Papers: Settings → Export → BibTeX/RIS for the whole library, OR the gear next to All PapersExport as → BibTeX (.bib); a collection can be exported the same way.
  • Or the auto-generated .bib: the Papers desktop app keeps a .bib per library inside the Papers Library folder (default ~/Documents/Papers Library/). Point the skill at it.
  • ReadCube desktop SQLite (no export needed): the modern ReadCube Papers app keeps a local library DB at ~/Library/Application Support/Papers/<uuid>.db. Read it directly with python3 <skill>/scripts/readcube_db.py [--db PATH] [--dry-run] [--out payload.json]. This is preferred when the user can't/won't export BibTeX, and when you want their lists/collections preserved as a topic taxonomy — a .bib/.ris export drops the list hierarchy and membership. readcube_db.py emits paper nodes + topic concept nodes (with part_of hierarchy + membership) in one ingest payload; pair it with scripts/github_repos.py --papers payload.json to add the user's GitHub repos and link them to the library (hub anchor + authored-paper auto-links). The connection is read-only/immutable, so a running Papers app is never touched.
  • Legacy Papers 3 (macOS): export to .bib/.ris first (File → Export), or script it via AppleScript. Its old SQLite DB (Database.papersdb) has a different schema from the ReadCube store above — prefer an export for Papers 3.

Ask the user for the path to the .bib/.ris file if they did not provide one. Exports carry references only, not PDFs — that is fine; this skill works from metadata.

Read the full file on GitHub · 88 lines

Files

What ships with it

6 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. 3d ago First seen · 88 lines · 117 tokens per session scan A 554536830466

Subscribe to this mod's changes

papers-library is a skill published in the GitHub repository grburgess/mindgap (0 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 117 tokens to every session and 1,569 once invoked, about $0.0006 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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