source-evaluation

source-evaluation is a skill for Claude Code from oborchers/fractional-cto. It costs 126 tokens per session (2,394 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A research guide for judging whether sources are trustworthy and choosing appropriate sources for a topic. It distinguishes sources such as peer-reviewed papers, government agencies, expert writing, and editorial publications.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to assess source credibility, choose academic, medical, legal, or technical sources, evaluate software packages and libraries, and compare research or search tools.
Why use it?
It helps prevent unreliable pages, search-engine spam, or unsuitable sources from weakening research and causing later conclusions to be wrong.

Skill for Claude Code

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

Part of the deep-research plugin — 5 skills, 1 command, 3 agents shipped together

Good fit Use it to assess source credibility, choose academic, medical, legal, or technical…

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/oborchers/fractional-cto/source-evaluation
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 oborchers/fractional-cto --skill source-evaluation
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/oborchers/fractional-cto

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install deep-research, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 5 skills, 1 command, 3 agents.

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 source-evaluation

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/oborchers/fractional-cto/source-evaluation.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/oborchers/fractional-cto/source-evaluation)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/oborchers/fractional-cto/source-evaluation"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/oborchers/fractional-cto/source-evaluation.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 126 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,394 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 1 finding. 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 $0.00126 $0.02394
Opus 5 $0.00063 $0.01197
Sonnet 5 $0.00025 $0.00479
Haiku 4.5 $0.00013 $0.00239

Measured 7d ago against content hash 69a09a01c4ae, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-06, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

source-evaluation scanned grade A with 1 finding 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.

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.

Makes network callslowCapability

Not a fault in itself. Listed so you know the mod talks to something, and to what.

| **npm** | `curl api.npmjs.org/downloads/point/last-week/{pkg}` | Exact weekly downloads |
deep-research/skills/source-evaluation/SKILL.md · 158 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 158 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Source Evaluation

Source quality is the primary bottleneck in research agent pipelines. Research on deep research agent trajectories found that over 57% of source errors occur in early retrieval stages, where initial fabrication acts as the primary catalyst for cascading downstream errors (arXiv 2601.22984). A single bad source in the first retrieval round contaminates the entire research trajectory.

Source Credibility Tiers

Every source encountered during research falls into one of six tiers. Always prefer higher-tier sources and cite the tier when reporting findings.

Tier Source Type Examples Trust Level
T1 — Primary Peer-reviewed journals, official specs, primary datasets Nature, Science, IEEE, IETF RFCs, W3C specs Highest
T2 — Institutional Government agencies, established research institutions NIH, WHO, NIST, ACM Digital Library High
T3 — Expert Named expert blogs, conference proceedings, major tech engineering blogs Anthropic blog, Google Research, NeurIPS/ICML papers Moderate-High
T4 — Quality Editorial Major publications with editorial review MIT Technology Review, Ars Technica, The Verge Moderate
T5 — Community Well-moderated forums, high-reputation answers Stack Overflow (high-score), GitHub discussions Low-Moderate
T6 — Unverified Content farms, SEO-optimized articles, anonymous posts, AI-generated content Medium listicles, affiliate blogs, uncredited tutorials Do not cite

Rule: Never cite T6 sources. Prefer T1-T3 for factual claims. Use T4-T5 for context and community consensus only.

The CRAAP Framework — Automated Signals

Adapted from the CRAAP framework (CSU Chico), five dimensions for evaluating sources:

Dimension What to Check Red Flags
Currency Publication date, last-modified headers No date visible, information predates major changes in the field
Relevance Does it address the specific research question? Tangential coverage, keyword-stuffed but shallow
Authority Who published it? Credentials? Anonymous author, no institutional affiliation, no citations
Accuracy Are claims sourced? Can they be verified? No inline citations, contradicts known facts, round numbers without source
Purpose Is it informing, selling, or persuading? High ad density, affiliate links, promotional language

Read the full file on GitHub · 158 lines

Files

What ships with it

2 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. 7d ago First seen · 158 lines · 126 tokens per session scan A 69a09a01c4ae

Subscribe to this mod's changes

source-evaluation is a skill published in the GitHub repository oborchers/fractional-cto (29 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 126 tokens to every session and 2,394 once invoked, about $0.0006 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 1 finding (makes network calls). No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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