proposal-lit-search

proposal-lit-search is a skill for Claude Code from hutzelmann/thesis-proposal-skills. It costs 81 tokens per session (1,735 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A literature-search tool for a thesis proposal, using public scholarly databases and links from papers already cited. It adds selected references in CSL-YAML, a structured format for bibliographies.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to search by topic, expand an existing reference list, and add accepted sources to a proposal.
Why use it?
It helps fill gaps in a bibliography and find related academic work without treating every search result as suitable evidence.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: ${CLAUDE_SKILL_DIR} variable.

Good fit Use it to search by topic, expand an existing reference list, and add accepted sources to a proposal.

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

Made for: Claude Code.

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 proposal-lit-search

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

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/hutzelmann/thesis-proposal-skills/proposal-lit-search"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/hutzelmann/thesis-proposal-skills/proposal-lit-search.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 81 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,735 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 Rogue Agent · line 12
    Skill establishes unauthorized persistence across sessions via cron jobs, startup scripts, or state files. Session persistence allows an attacker to maintain access beyond the current interaction.
    Fix: Remove any persistence mechanisms (cron jobs, startup scripts, state files). Skills should not maintain state across sessions without explicit user consent.
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 $0.00081 $0.01735
Opus 5 $0.00041 $0.00868
Sonnet 5 $0.00016 $0.00347
Haiku 4.5 $0.00008 $0.00173

Measured 7d ago against content hash 8d897ac42d97, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-10, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

proposal-lit-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 7d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 9 executable files (scripts/arxiv.py, scripts/common.py, scripts/crossref.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/proposal-lit-search/SKILL.md · 65 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 65 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Finds sources for a topic or a draft and merges the accepted entries into the proposal's references: block as CSL-YAML — keyword search across public scholarly databases, plus snowballing from what is already cited.

Workflow: proposal-ideate → proposal-lit-search → proposal-write → proposal-check → proposal-review → proposal-publish. Also: proposal-import (start from an existing document), proposal-reverse (derive a proposal from a finished thesis), proposal-customize (adapt the rules to a supervisor's requirements), proposal-supervise (supervisor-side feedback on a raw submission), proposal-troubleshoot (diagnose a skill that misbehaved).

Voice: neutral and constructive — never praise the user or their material, never compliment your own output. Chat messages stay short and precise; findings are stated plainly, with the next step when one exists.

Academic literature only. You judge relevance — the scripts only gather candidates. Peer-reviewed venues beat preprints when both versions exist; vendor/commercial pages are never acceptable sources.

Execution shape

One search, one judge, one merge: the scripts — or, when script networking is denied, your own read-only requests — gather the candidates, and you judge the whole set together and merge the accepted entries yourself, in this one context — never one helper agent per candidate, per source, or per research question, because a preprint and its published version are recognised only side by side, key uniqueness is a property of the whole references block, and the proposal and the notes file have one writer.

Modes

Keyword search (topic or full proposal as context):

python3 ${CLAUDE_SKILL_DIR}/scripts/search.py "distributed consensus energy efficiency" --limit 10

${CLAUDE_SKILL_DIR} is substituted by the host with this skill's install directory; on a host that leaves it unexpanded, the script really lives in scripts/ next to this SKILL.md, so use that path — but keep running the command from the working directory, where api-keys.env is looked up: the fallback changes where the script is found, never where you work. If you cannot find it, say the script did not run and name what is therefore unverified — never present your own reading of the file as the script's result.

Read the full file on GitHub · 65 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. 7d ago Changed · +4 lines 8d897ac42d97
  2. 11d ago First seen · 61 lines · 81 tokens per session scan A e0bb34b3a4d5

Subscribe to this mod's changes

proposal-lit-search is a skill published in the GitHub repository hutzelmann/thesis-proposal-skills (7 stars, last pushed 8d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 81 tokens to every session and 1,735 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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