literature-review

literature-review is a skill for Claude Code from Mathews-Tom/armory. It costs 74 tokens per session (2,139 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A structured workflow for finding, screening, extracting, and combining research papers on a defined question.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to survey a research area, write related work, compare findings, and identify gaps in existing research.
Why use it?
It replaces an unfocused search with clear inclusion and exclusion rules, helping separate relevant evidence from tangential work.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Needs its repository: it runs a file that does not travel with it, so clone the repository first. The line is uv run --with arxiv python scripts/arxiv_search.py "QUERY" --max-results 30 --sort-by relevance.

Part of the armory plugin — 85 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it to survey a research area, write related work, compare findings, and identify gaps in existing research.

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/Mathews-Tom/armory
agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/mathews-tom/armory/literature-review

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install armory, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 85 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-review

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/mathews-tom/armory/literature-review/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/mathews-tom/armory/literature-review)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/mathews-tom/armory/literature-review"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/mathews-tom/armory/literature-review/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-review

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/mathews-tom/armory/literature-review"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/mathews-tom/armory/literature-review.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 74 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,139 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: 3 findings, 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 66
    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.
  • medium Prompt Injection · line 188
    Large whitespace padding was detected (a block of blank lines or a long run of spaces). This can push injected instructions below or to the right of the visible area so a human reviewer never sees them while the agent still reads them. Manual review of the hidden content is recommended.
    Fix: Remove the large whitespace padding (blank-line blocks or long space runs) and review any content hidden below or to the right of it. Keep skill files compact and reviewable so no instructions can be
  • medium Prompt Injection · line 192
    Large whitespace padding was detected (a block of blank lines or a long run of spaces). This can push injected instructions below or to the right of the visible area so a human reviewer never sees them while the agent still reads them. Manual review of the hidden content is recommended.
    Fix: Remove the large whitespace padding (blank-line blocks or long space runs) and review any content hidden below or to the right of it. Keep skill files compact and reviewable so no instructions can be
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 $0.00074 $0.02139
Opus 5 $0.00037 $0.01069
Sonnet 5 $0.00015 $0.00428
Haiku 4.5 $0.00007 $0.00214

Measured 11d ago against content hash 441f0e05042f, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

literature-review 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 11d 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.

skills/literature-review/SKILL.md · 197 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 197 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Literature Review

Systematic discovery, extraction, and synthesis of academic research on a defined topic.

When to use this skill vs. others

Need Skill
Survey a research area, synthesize multiple papers literature-review (this skill)
Critique a single paper's methodology and claims research-critique
Audit a manuscript's formatting, structure, citations manuscript-review
Verify a manuscript's numbers trace to code manuscript-provenance
Search arXiv for papers matching a query arxiv-search (utility)

Workflow

Phase 1: Scope Definition

Before searching, establish the review boundaries:

  1. Research question — What specific question does the review answer? Vague topics produce vague reviews. "What techniques exist for X" is weaker than "How do methods for X compare on metric Y across domains Z?"
  2. Inclusion criteria — Define what counts:
    • Date range (e.g., 2020–present)
    • Publication type (peer-reviewed, preprints, both)
    • Domains/categories (e.g., cs.CL, cs.AI)
    • Minimum relevance threshold
  3. Exclusion criteria — Define what does not count:
    • Tangentially related work
    • Non-primary sources (blog posts, tutorials) unless explicitly included
    • Duplicate or superseded versions
  4. Expected output — What form should the review take? Narrative synthesis, tabular comparison, gap analysis, annotated bibliography, or related-work section?

Present the scope to the user for confirmation before proceeding.

Phase 2: Search & Discovery

Execute searches across available sources. Use multiple queries with varying specificity to avoid single-query blind spots.

Primary source: arXiv (via arxiv-search utility)

uv run --with arxiv python scripts/arxiv_search.py "QUERY" --max-results 30 --sort-by relevance

Read the full file on GitHub · 197 lines

Files

What ships with it

4 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. 11d ago First seen · 197 lines · 74 tokens per session scan A 441f0e05042f

Subscribe to this mod's changes

literature-review is a skill published in the GitHub repository Mathews-Tom/armory (316 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 74 tokens to every session and 2,139 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 2026-08-30.

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