Scientific Agent Skills is a collection of reusable procedures that give AI agents capabilities for scientific research across areas such as biology, chemistry, medicine, and drug discovery. It is used by researchers and by people building AI scientist workflows with compatible coding agents. The catalogue contains many of the project's skills and supporting instructions.
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 K-Dense-AI/scientific-agent-skills --skill research-lookupgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/K-Dense-AI/scientific-agent-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/k-dense-ai/scientific-agent-skills/research-lookup)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/k-dense-ai/scientific-agent-skills/research-lookup"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/k-dense-ai/scientific-agent-skills/research-lookup/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/k-dense-ai/scientific-agent-skills/research-lookup"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/k-dense-ai/scientific-agent-skills/research-lookup.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>- Socket warn
- Snyk fail
- 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 Data Exfiltration · line 234 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.
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 | $0.00082 | $0.03162 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00041 | $0.01581 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00016 | $0.00632 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00008 | $0.00316 |
Grade A, and why
research-lookup 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 9d 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.
Copies of this mod
1 near-identical copy found in the catalogue:
- research-lookup — 94% identical, 19 lines differ
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 356 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Research Lookup
Compile the external evidence needed to plan and write a high-quality scientific manuscript. The default academic workflow targets 60 verified, unique references and produces a manuscript-ready research packet rather than a loose list of links.
Scope and boundaries
Use this skill when the user explicitly wants:
- literature and background research for a manuscript
- many high-quality academic references
- evidence supporting or contradicting a scientific claim
- a structured evidence matrix or claim-to-source map
- current studies, methods precedent, mechanisms, limitations, or research gaps
Do not activate it for casual factual questions that do not need research, private or unpublished material, or a claim that can be answered from user-provided files. Query text is sent to Parallel. It is sent to OpenRouter only when Perplexity is explicitly selected or the user enables that fallback.
This skill compiles external evidence. It cannot supply the user's unpublished
study data, decide what their Results show, or guarantee systematic-review
completeness. For a PRISMA-style systematic review, use literature-review for
protocols, database-specific searching, screening, exclusion reasons, and risk of
bias.
Parallel-first routing
| Need | Backend | Selection |
|---|---|---|
| Manuscript literature and references | Parallel Search + Extract | Default; use --academic |
| Fast bounded web lookup | Parallel Search | Use --no-academic |
| Deep/exhaustive multi-source report | Parallel Research | Explicit --force-backend research |
| OpenAI-compatible synthesis with research basis | Parallel Chat | Explicit --force-backend chat |
| Optional alternative academic search | Perplexity via OpenRouter | Explicit or enabled failure fallback |
Important compatibility behavior:
- A bare script query uses Parallel Search. Chat Completions remains available only through explicit backend selection.
--force-backend parallelremains an alias for explicit Parallel Research.- Academic keywords select the multi-pass Parallel academic strategy; they do not silently switch the provider to Perplexity.
--batch,--json,-o/--output, theResearchLookupclass, progress output, and the existing result envelope remain supported.
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.
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.
- 9d ago First seen · 356 lines · 82 tokens per session scan A 7288cf334db5
research-lookup is a skill published in the GitHub repository K-Dense-AI/scientific-agent-skills (44,469 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 82 tokens to every session and 3,162 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 2026-09-03.
Other skills, from other repositories
discovery-toolbox
A routed repertoire of 90 scientific thinking operators for biological research agents - visual reasoning, detectability and information budgets, search reframing, causal identification, competing explanations, observation and selection processes, pipeline artifact diagnosis, effort allocation, and confirmation…
discovery-director
Operate as a research director making original discoveries from a given biological question and dataset. Use when the task is open-ended scientific research, exploring omics or experimental data for findings, hypothesis generation and testing, screening a large candidate space of genes, variants, features or…
inbound-lead-enrichment
Fills in missing data for inbound leads — researches the company, identifies the person's role and seniority, finds other stakeholders at the company, checks for existing CRM relationships, and updates the lead record. Produces enriched lead data ready for qualification or outreach. Tool-agnostic.
demo-builder
Builds personalized demo assets for top prospects using the founder's product API/MCP/SDK. Researches prospect, proposes demo concepts, builds working prototype, tests it, and generates comparison report with live demo link.
create-imessage-mockup
Render pixel-accurate iMessage screenshot mockups (DM or group) from a thread JSON. Supports minimal, with-keyboard, and full iPhone 15 Pro frame variants. Outputs HTML + PNG.
industry-scanner
Daily industry intelligence scanner. Scans web, social media, news, blogs, and communities for industry-relevant events, trends, and signals. Produces a comprehensive intelligence briefing plus strategic GTM opportunity ideas. Orchestrates existing scraping skills — does not reimplement data collection.