literature-review

literature-review is a skill for Claude Code from ShaishavMaisuria/research-paper-lifecycle-skills. It costs 165 tokens per session (3,071 once invoked), scanned A, original, Apache-2.0.

A tool for producing a literature review, a structured summary of existing research on a question or topic. It organizes papers by theme and supports claims with verified references.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to survey a research topic, describe the state of the art, synthesize a supplied set of papers, or prepare the research background before writing Related Work.
Why use it?
It reduces the work of searching, reading, checking citations, and combining many papers into a coherent view of what is already known.

Skill for Claude Code

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

Part of the paper-writing plugin — 7 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it to survey a research topic, describe the state of the art, synthesize a supplied set of papers, or prepare the research background before writing Related Work.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/shaishavmaisuria/research-paper-lifecycle-skills/literature-review
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 ShaishavMaisuria/research-paper-lifecycle-skills --skill literature-review
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/ShaishavMaisuria/research-paper-lifecycle-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install paper-writing, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 7 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/shaishavmaisuria/research-paper-lifecycle-skills/literature-review/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/shaishavmaisuria/research-paper-lifecycle-skills/literature-review)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/shaishavmaisuria/research-paper-lifecycle-skills/literature-review"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/shaishavmaisuria/research-paper-lifecycle-skills/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/shaishavmaisuria/research-paper-lifecycle-skills/literature-review"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/shaishavmaisuria/research-paper-lifecycle-skills/literature-review.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 165 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,071 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 $0.00165 $0.03071
Opus 5 $0.00082 $0.01536
Sonnet 5 $0.00033 $0.00614
Haiku 4.5 $0.00016 $0.00307

Measured 12d ago against content hash 91fe73f99224, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

literature-review 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 12d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 4 executable files (scripts/check_review.py, scripts/corpus.py, scripts/forward_refs.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.

Makes network callslowCapability

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

Never reimplement these inline (no ad-hoc `curl` against scholarly APIs);
skills/literature-review/SKILL.md · 223 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 223 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Literature Review

Produce a themed, citation-grounded review document from a research question. This skill is the orchestrator: searching, fetching, and citation verification are delegated to sibling skills; this skill owns the workspace, the screening corpus, claim extraction, thematic synthesis, and the final coverage gate.

When to use

  • "Do a literature review on X" / "survey recent work on X"
  • "What's the state of the art in X since 2023?"
  • "Read these N papers and synthesize them by theme"
  • A standalone survey is wanted. For a paper's Related Work section, do the corpus-building phases here, then hand off to draft-related-work.

Inputs

  • A research question or topic, ideally with year range and (optionally) target venues.
  • CONTACT_EMAIL exported for the sibling skills' API politeness contract.
  • Optional: an existing list of papers/DOIs the user already has.

Sibling skills this skill delegates to

Stage Delegate to What it provides
Search find-papers dblp_search.py, crossref_search.py, s2_search.py, arxiv_search.py (in that skill's script dir) — key-free, rate-limited, cached
Full text fetch-paper resolve_oa.py — one DOI/arXiv ID → legal OA copy, transient
Reference check verify-citations validates every BibTeX entry against Crossref/DBLP/S2, flags retractions

Never reimplement these inline (no ad-hoc curl against scholarly APIs); the sibling scripts carry the rate-limit, backoff, caching, and User-Agent contract.

Process

Phase 1 — Scope

  1. Pin down with the user: research question, year range, inclusion and exclusion criteria (2–4 each), target size (10–15 papers is a solid default; >30 needs explicit user buy-in).
  2. Run python3 scripts/init_review.py "TOPIC" — creates lit-review/<slug>/ with corpus.json, themes.yml, notes/, and a review.md skeleton.
  3. Write the agreed criteria into corpus.json under criteria.

Phase 2 — Search (delegate to find-papers)

Read the full file on GitHub · 223 lines

Files

What ships with it

7 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. 12d ago First seen · 223 lines · 165 tokens per session scan A 91fe73f99224

Subscribe to this mod's changes

literature-review is a skill published in the GitHub repository ShaishavMaisuria/research-paper-lifecycle-skills (42 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 165 tokens to every session and 3,071 once invoked, about $0.0008 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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