literature-survey

literature-survey is a skill for Claude Code from JeanDiable/academic-research-plugin. It costs 115 tokens per session (2,426 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A workflow for researching an AI or machine-learning topic across academic databases. It reviews recent papers, looks for research gaps, examines related fields, and suggests possible new directions.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to investigate a topic, find recent work on arXiv, Semantic Scholar, and DBLP, identify gaps, and assess potential innovation ideas.
Why use it?
It helps organize a broad paper search and connect existing findings to practical research opportunities.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: user-invocable in frontmatter.

Needs its repository: it runs a file that does not travel with it, so clone the repository first. The line is ./output/literature-survey/YYYY-MM-DD-HHMMSS/.

Part of the academic-research plugin — 10 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it to investigate a topic, find recent work on arXiv, Semantic Scholar, and DBLP, identify gaps, and assess potential innovation ideas.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install

Getting it into your agent

It runs from inside its repository, so the clone comes first — what it calls does not travel with the file alone.

Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/JeanDiable/academic-research-plugin
agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/jeandiable/academic-research-plugin/literature-survey

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install academic-research, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 10 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 literature-survey

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/jeandiable/academic-research-plugin/literature-survey/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/jeandiable/academic-research-plugin/literature-survey)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/jeandiable/academic-research-plugin/literature-survey"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/jeandiable/academic-research-plugin/literature-survey/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 literature-survey

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/jeandiable/academic-research-plugin/literature-survey"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/jeandiable/academic-research-plugin/literature-survey.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 115 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,426 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.
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 $0.00115 $0.02426
Opus 5 $0.00057 $0.01213
Sonnet 5 $0.00023 $0.00485
Haiku 4.5 $0.00012 $0.00243

Measured 12d ago against content hash 40cb4e75f17a, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

literature-survey 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 12d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 2 executable files (scripts/bibtex_utils.py, scripts/paper_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/literature-survey/SKILL.md · 297 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 297 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Literature Survey Skill

Overview

The literature-survey skill performs a comprehensive topic-driven literature survey for AI/ML research. It systematically searches multiple academic databases (arXiv, Semantic Scholar, DBLP), identifies research gaps, performs cross-domain exploration to discover transferable methods, and proposes 2-3 innovation directions with detailed feasibility assessments.

Arguments

Parse $ARGUMENTS as follows:

  • Topic (required): The first argument is the research topic string to survey. Example: "vision transformer", "graph neural networks", "federated learning privacy".

  • --date-range (optional): Time window for paper search. Default: 1y (1 year). Supported values: 1y, 2y, 3y. Controls the lookback period from today.

  • --max-papers (optional): Maximum number of papers to retrieve per search query. Default: 50. Useful for scoping large topics. Values: 10-200.

  • --venues (optional): Comma-separated list of conference/journal abbreviations to filter results. Example: --venues NeurIPS,ICML,ICCV. If omitted, all venues are included.

Setup

This skill requires one-time dependency installation. Run:

pip install -r BASE_DIR/scripts/requirements.txt

Replace BASE_DIR with the base directory of the academic-research-plugin project (shown at the top of this skill's loaded context).

Required dependencies typically include:

  • requests — for HTTP queries to research databases
  • arxiv — Python client for arXiv API
  • bibtexparser — for parsing and generating BibTeX
  • pandas — for data aggregation and analysis

Workflow

Follow these 7 steps to complete a comprehensive literature survey:

Step 1: Decompose Topic into Search Queries

Break the user's topic into 3-5 focused search queries to capture different aspects and terminology variations:

  • Use synonyms and alternative phrasing
  • Include sub-problems and related terms
  • Target specific methodologies, applications, and theoretical angles

Read the full file on GitHub · 297 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. 12d ago First seen · 297 lines · 115 tokens per session scan A 40cb4e75f17a

Subscribe to this mod's changes

literature-survey is a skill published in the GitHub repository JeanDiable/academic-research-plugin (22 stars, last pushed 5mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 115 tokens to every session and 2,426 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 2026-08-30.

Related

Other skills, from other repositories

instrument-data-to-allotrope

Convert laboratory instrument output files (PDF, CSV, Excel, TXT) to Allotrope Simple Model (ASM) JSON format or flattened 2D CSV. Use this skill when scientists need to standardize instrument data for LIMS systems, data lakes, or downstream analysis. Supports auto-detection of instrument types. Outputs include full…

anthropics/knowledge-work-plugins · 123 tokens

exploratory-data-analysis

Perform bounded, local exploratory analysis of explicitly supported scientific files. Use for redacted CSV/TSV/JSON profiles; optional NumPy, HDF5, FASTA/FASTQ, and basic image metadata inspection; missingness/leakage audits; outlier and transformation sensitivity; and rigorous EDA report scaffolds. Other domain…

K-Dense-AI/scientific-agent-skills · 83 tokens

matlab

Build, review, migrate, and safely plan MATLAB or GNU Octave numerical workflows, including arrays, tabular/time data, tests, projects, graphics, MAT files, and explicit Python interoperability.

K-Dense-AI/scientific-agent-skills · 42 tokens

phylogenetics

Build and analyze phylogenetic trees using MAFFT (multiple alignment), IQ-TREE 2 (maximum likelihood), and FastTree (fast NJ/ML). Visualize with ETE3 or FigTree. For evolutionary analysis, microbial genomics, viral phylodynamics, protein family analysis, and molecular clock studies.

K-Dense-AI/scientific-agent-skills · 68 tokens

research-engineer

An uncompromising Academic Research Engineer. Operates with absolute scientific rigor, objective criticism, and zero flair. Focuses on theoretical correctness, formal verification, and optimal implementation across any required technology.

davila7/claude-code-templates · 43 tokens

mapping-to-snomed

Maps clinical concept spans extracted by OpenMed to SNOMED CT concepts through a USER-SUPPLIED terminology server (the user's own Ontoserver, Snowstorm, or UMLS/UTS), never a bundled vocabulary. Use when the user wants to code findings, disorders, procedures, body structures, or substances to SNOMED CT, run an ECL…

maziyarpanahi/openmed · 205 tokens