sota-writer

sota-writer is a skill for Claude Code from roomi-fields/paper-trail. It costs 208 tokens per session (3,406 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A research-writing guide for producing State-of-the-Art reviews, which summarize and compare existing academic work on a topic. It requires claims to be supported by validated reference notes.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to write, update, or expand a literature review for an academic project, with each claim linked to verified source notes.
Why use it?
It helps prevent made-up citations, incorrect authors, misquoted papers, and claims that misrepresent research findings.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: PreToolUse hook event. Also seen: mentions subagents.

Part of the paper-trail plugin — 6 skills, 22 commands, 6 agents, 3 hooks shipped together

Good fit Use it to write, update, or expand a literature review for an academic project, with each claim linked to verified source notes.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/roomi-fields/paper-trail/sota-writer
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 roomi-fields/paper-trail --skill sota-writer
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/roomi-fields/paper-trail

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install paper-trail, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 6 skills, 22 commands, 6 agents, 3 hooks.

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 sota-writer

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/roomi-fields/paper-trail/sota-writer/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/roomi-fields/paper-trail/sota-writer)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/roomi-fields/paper-trail/sota-writer"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/roomi-fields/paper-trail/sota-writer/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 sota-writer

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/roomi-fields/paper-trail/sota-writer"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/roomi-fields/paper-trail/sota-writer.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 208 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,406 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.
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 $0.00208 $0.03406
Opus 5 $0.00104 $0.01703
Sonnet 5 $0.00042 $0.00681
Haiku 4.5 $0.00021 $0.00341

Measured 6d ago against content hash bf8c621c4b9d, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-10, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

sota-writer 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 6d 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/sota-writer/SKILL.md · 316 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 316 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Skill : SOTA Writer (research-first, anti-hallucination)

Why this skill exists

Citation hallucinations in academic writing are systemic when the author writes from memory and looks up sources afterward. They include inverted attributions ("X proved Y" when X proved ¬Y), fabricated quotes (text in quotation marks that doesn't appear in the cited source), wrong attributions (citing the wrong author for a known result), and confusion between similar-named papers (homonymy).

The plugin paper-trail exists because a retracted paper in 2026-02 contained 12 such errors, signaled by the misrepresented author themselves. This skill encodes the inverted workflow : research → read → write. Slower in appearance, faster in practice : no post-submission audit, no remediation, no reviewer embarrassment.

Scope

  • Vault root : $RESEARCH_VAULT_PATH (resolved via the adapter, default obsidian)
  • Registry : $RESEARCH_REGISTRY_PATH/refs/*.md (one .md file per ref with YAML frontmatter)
  • SOTA output location : resolved via adapter.sota_output_path(topic_slug)

The supreme rule

No claim in a SOTA without pointing to the notes body of a ref file in state page1_validated (or higher). If I want to write X but no source supports X → either I find one, or I don't write X. No rhetorical rephrasing to "keep" an unsourced claim.

Mandatory 4-phase workflow

A. EXHAUSTIVE RESEARCH
   ├─ paper-search MCP (search_papers multi-source, 22 platforms)
   ├─ rtfm_search (optional — local indexed corpus if configured)
   ├─ NotebookLM (optional — books corpus if RESEARCH_ENABLE_NOTEBOOKLM=1)
   ├─ WebSearch (course pages, personal pages, archive.org)
   └─ → N candidate refs in state `candidate` (file `.md` created for each)

B. ACQUISITION + PAGE 1 VALIDATION
   ├─ Delegate to pdf-cascade skill (paper-trail)
   ├─ 10-source cascade (up to 17 with browser + opt-in routes) + mandatory
   │  page 1 anti-homonymy validation
   └─ → refs in state `page1_validated` (physical PDF + validated)

C. READING / EXTRACTION
   ├─ For each ref in `page1_validated` : read abstract + relevant sections
   ├─ Notes written in the markdown body of the ref file (under frontmatter)
   └─ → structured notes corpus (direct input for writing phase)

D. WRITING FROM NOTES ONLY
   ├─ Each citing sentence points to its ref file via wikilink
   ├─ Each cited ref transitions to `sota_cited_confirmed` as it's used
   ├─ If I want to write X and no note supports X :
   │     either return to phase A (find a source that says X)
   │     or don't write X
   └─ → publishable SOTA (all citations in `sota_cited_confirmed`)

Read the full file on GitHub · 316 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. 6d ago Changed · +1 lines bf8c621c4b9d
  2. 10d ago First seen · 315 lines · 208 tokens per session scan A c4cb863f96e5

Subscribe to this mod's changes

sota-writer is a skill published in the GitHub repository roomi-fields/paper-trail (5 stars, last pushed 6d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 208 tokens to every session and 3,406 once invoked, about $0.0010 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 2026-08-31.

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