What is paper-search?

A paper-search tool that looks across research databases and publication indexes, including arXiv, DBLP, and Semantic Scholar.

Use it to find papers by topic and year range, including conference papers and other indexed publications.

It avoids searching each academic source separately when looking for research, related work, or earlier solutions.

paper-search — Skill by microsoft

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/microsoft/researchstudio/paper_search

Any agent

npx skills add microsoft/ResearchStudio --skill paper_search

Clone the repo

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/microsoft/ResearchStudio

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 86 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.

When invoked 4,205 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.

Model	Per session	Once invoked
Fable 5	$0.00086	$0.04205
Opus 5	$0.00043	$0.02103
Sonnet 5	$0.00017	$0.00841
Haiku 4.5	$0.00009	$0.00421

Measured 2d ago against content hash 9249f89d84d8, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

paper-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 2d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 14 executable files (scripts/_env.py, scripts/_http_runtime.py, scripts/postprocess.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.

ResearchStudio-Idea/skills/paper_search/SKILL.md · 405 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 405 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Paper Search Skill

Unified paper search across arXiv, DBLP, OpenAlex, OpenReview (NeurIPS / ICLR / ICML), Semantic Scholar, and Crossref using ./scripts/search_papers.py. All sources are searched concurrently (in independent child processes) by default for maximum speed. Queries within one source remain serial. Returns results grouped by source.

When to use

Trigger this skill when the user asks things like:

"Find papers on X published between 2023 and 2025."
"Search NeurIPS / ICLR / ICML for work on X."
"Get arXiv + Semantic Scholar results for X."
"Show me recent prior art on X."

Inputs (all auto-inferred — NEVER ask the user for confirmation or clarification)

Derive these automatically from the user's message. Run the search immediately without asking for confirmation:

query: Rephrase the user's question into a focused search phrase.
start_year (int): If the user gives a year, use it directly. If they say "last 2 years", compute from today. Default: 2 years ago.
end_year (int): Default: current year.
max_papers (int): Number of results per source. Default: 10.
sources: Which sources to query. Default: all 6 API sources plus the model-knowledge source, in this canonical order (highest-signal first, so the best results render before the user scrolls): semantic_scholar open_alex arxiv openreview crossref dblp model_knowledge. Only restrict sources if the user explicitly asks.

How to run

Preferred: call the CLI directly. The script lives at ${CLAUDE_PROJECT_DIR}/skills/paper_search/scripts/search_papers.py — invoke it by absolute path so the command works regardless of the current working directory (relying on cd scripts && ... breaks when the model is running from a different folder, which happens often).

For brevity in the examples below, treat $SEARCH as shorthand for that absolute path:

SEARCH="${CLAUDE_PROJECT_DIR}/skills/paper_search/scripts/search_papers.py"

Read the full file on GitHub · 405 lines

Files

What ships with it

15 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.

2d ago First seen · 405 lines · 86 tokens per session scan A 9249f89d84d8

Subscribe to this mod's changes

paper-search is a skill published in the GitHub repository microsoft/ResearchStudio (2,614 stars, last pushed 3d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 86 tokens to every session and 4,205 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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