how-to-download-ref

how-to-download-ref is a skill for Claude Code from QuantumBFS/sci-brain. It costs 43 tokens per session (3,243 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

An automated helper for adding research papers to a knowledge base. It fetches paper details, PDFs, and readable full text from arXiv or DOI references; arXiv is a public repository of research papers.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to import individual papers or reading lists, extract their text, and update references.bib and INDEX.md.
Why use it?
It avoids manually downloading papers and keeping bibliography and index files in sync.

Skill for Claude Code

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

Part of the sci-brain plugin — 17 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it to import individual papers or reading lists, extract their text, and update references.bib and INDEX.md.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/quantumbfs/sci-brain/how-to-download-ref
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 QuantumBFS/sci-brain --skill how-to-download-ref
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/QuantumBFS/sci-brain

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install sci-brain, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 17 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 how-to-download-ref

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/quantumbfs/sci-brain/how-to-download-ref/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/quantumbfs/sci-brain/how-to-download-ref)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/quantumbfs/sci-brain/how-to-download-ref"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/quantumbfs/sci-brain/how-to-download-ref/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 how-to-download-ref

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/quantumbfs/sci-brain/how-to-download-ref"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/quantumbfs/sci-brain/how-to-download-ref.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 43 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,243 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 pass 7 Sept 2026
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 $0.00043 $0.03243
Opus 5.5 $0.00017 $0.01297
Sonnet 5.5 $0.00009 $0.00649
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00324

Measured 24d ago against content hash 852bba04315a, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-10-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

how-to-download-ref 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 24d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 14 executable files (helpers/append_bibtex.py, helpers/aps_harvest.py, helpers/bibtex_to_manifest.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/how-to-download-ref/SKILL.md · 280 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 280 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Installed resources

Keep the working directory at the user's project. Resolve this loaded SKILL.md with Path(path).resolve() before locating resources; follow symlinks. Bare helpers/, references/, and template paths are relative to that real skill directory. A path written as skills/<name>/... means the installed <name> skill's directory from the agent's skill catalog, not a path in the user's project. Locate each dependency by its public skill name; copied skills need not be siblings. If a dependency is absent, report the missing skill and install it before that step. Shared writing files are bundled in how-to-write-ideas-report/references/.

Before running the examples, set DOWNLOAD_REF_DIR to the absolute directory of how-to-download-ref. Quote these variables as shown.

how-to-download-ref

When to use

  • A discussion / draft surfaces a paper not yet in the project KB, and you want it indexed for future search.
  • The user says "add this ref to the KB", "download arXiv:XXXX", "pull this DOI".
  • Bulk-importing a reading list from issue threads / chat history / a references.bib.

Do NOT use:

  • For GitHub repos / web pages — those are too varied for a single-shot helper.

Setup

Every helper runs under plain python3. Metadata fetching needs nothing else. Rendering wants pymupdf4llm (without it the output is text-only: figures missing, equations mangled), APS JATS needs pandoc, and the Sci-Hub fallback needs playwright. Check the backend you are about to use:

python3 -c "import pymupdf4llm; print('ok', pymupdf4llm.__version__)"

Install commands, the text-only fallback chain, OCR, and latexpand are in dependencies.md; read only the part you need.

Inputs

  • One or more arXiv IDs (e.g. 1806.08734, 2006.10739) — strip the vN suffix.
  • One or more DOIs (e.g. 10.1103/PhysRevLett.130.036401) — lowercase preferred; renderer normalizes.
  • KB path — see Step 1.

Read the full file on GitHub · 280 lines

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. 24d ago Changed · -148 lines 852bba04315a
  2. 1mo ago Changed · +1 lines 96931835ada2
  3. 1mo ago Changed · +44 lines 278309ee04b0
  4. 1mo ago Changed · +66 lines d6ce894cd447
  5. 1mo ago First seen · 317 lines · 43 tokens per session scan A c80ca5150b92

Subscribe to this mod's changes

how-to-download-ref is a skill published in the GitHub repository QuantumBFS/sci-brain (101 stars, last pushed 23d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 43 tokens to every session and 3,243 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5.5. 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.

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