biorxiv-database

biorxiv-database is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from silverstein/claude-scientific-skills-desktop. It costs 52 tokens per session (3,159 once invoked), scanned A, a copy of biorxiv-database, MIT.

A search connection to bioRxiv, a website where life-science researchers share papers before formal journal review.

In plain words
What is it for?
Searching preprints by keywords, authors, dates, or subject; retrieving metadata; downloading PDFs; and supporting literature reviews.
Why use it?
It reduces the time needed to find recent research and gather its basic citation details.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

Needs its repository: it runs a file that does not travel with it, so clone the repository first. The line is python tests/test_biorxiv_search.py.

Good fit Searching preprints by keywords, authors, dates, or subject; retrieving metadata; downloading PDFs; and supporting literature reviews.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install

Getting it into your agent

It runs from inside its repository, so the clone comes first — what it calls does not travel with the file alone.

Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/silverstein/claude-scientific-skills-desktop
agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/silverstein/claude-scientific-skills-desktop/biorxiv-database

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

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 biorxiv-database

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/silverstein/claude-scientific-skills-desktop/biorxiv-database/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/silverstein/claude-scientific-skills-desktop/biorxiv-database)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/silverstein/claude-scientific-skills-desktop/biorxiv-database"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/silverstein/claude-scientific-skills-desktop/biorxiv-database/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 biorxiv-database

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/silverstein/claude-scientific-skills-desktop/biorxiv-database"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/silverstein/claude-scientific-skills-desktop/biorxiv-database.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 52 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,159 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 98% copy Near-identical to another mod 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 $0.00052 $0.03159
Opus 5 $0.00026 $0.01580
Sonnet 5 $0.00010 $0.00632
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00316

Measured 11d ago against content hash db16a65fb8ba, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

biorxiv-database 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 11d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 1 executable file (scripts/biorxiv_search.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.

Origin

This is a copy

98% identical to biorxiv-database — 5 lines differ, which has more behind it and is treated as the original. This page carries a canonical link to it rather than competing with it.

corpus/biorxiv-database/SKILL.md · 478 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 478 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

bioRxiv Database

Overview

This skill provides efficient Python-based tools for searching and retrieving preprints from the bioRxiv database. It enables comprehensive searches by keywords, authors, date ranges, and categories, returning structured JSON metadata that includes titles, abstracts, DOIs, and citation information. The skill also supports PDF downloads for full-text analysis.

When to Use This Skill

Use this skill when:

  • Searching for recent preprints in specific research areas
  • Tracking publications by particular authors
  • Conducting systematic literature reviews
  • Analyzing research trends over time periods
  • Retrieving metadata for citation management
  • Downloading preprint PDFs for analysis
  • Filtering papers by bioRxiv subject categories

Core Search Capabilities

1. Keyword Search

Search for preprints containing specific keywords in titles, abstracts, or author lists.

Basic Usage:

python scripts/biorxiv_search.py \
  --keywords "CRISPR" "gene editing" \
  --start-date 2024-01-01 \
  --end-date 2024-12-31 \
  --output results.json

With Category Filter:

python scripts/biorxiv_search.py \
  --keywords "neural networks" "deep learning" \
  --days-back 180 \
  --category neuroscience \
  --output recent_neuroscience.json

Search Fields: By default, keywords are searched in both title and abstract. Customize with --search-fields:

python scripts/biorxiv_search.py \
  --keywords "AlphaFold" \
  --search-fields title \
  --days-back 365

2. Author Search

Find all papers by a specific author within a date range.

Basic Usage:

python scripts/biorxiv_search.py \
  --author "Smith" \
  --start-date 2023-01-01 \
  --end-date 2024-12-31 \
  --output smith_papers.json

Recent Publications:

# Last year by default if no dates specified
python scripts/biorxiv_search.py \
  --author "Johnson" \
  --output johnson_recent.json

3. Date Range Search

Retrieve all preprints posted within a specific date range.

Read the full file on GitHub · 478 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. 11d ago First seen · 478 lines · 52 tokens per session scan A db16a65fb8ba

Subscribe to this mod's changes

biorxiv-database is a skill published in the GitHub repository silverstein/claude-scientific-skills-desktop (22 stars, last pushed 5mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 52 tokens to every session and 3,159 once invoked, about $0.0003 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. It is 98% identical to biorxiv-database, differing in 5 lines, and is treated as a copy.

Related

Other skills, from other repositories

bio-ortholog-inference

Pull pre-computed ortholog calls from public databases (OrthoDB, Ensembl Compara, OMA browser, eggNOG, PANTHER, KEGG Orthology, HomoloGene) via their REST APIs. Use when orthologs are already curated upstream, when the question is "what is the X ortholog of Y" rather than "how to infer orthology de novo", when…

PKU-YuanGroup/OpenAI4S · 141 tokens

admet_genetic

ADMET-guided genetic molecule optimization workflow from seed SMILES; use when the agent needs to build or run an RDKit/SA-Score/ADMET-AI GA pipeline for molecule optimization, enforce molecule lineage logs, render optimization-history HTML dashboards, and write candidate triage reports.

PKU-YuanGroup/OpenAI4S · 63 tokens

bioprobench

Score an LLM's biological-protocol reasoning on the BioProBench benchmark: protocol QA, step ordering, error detection, protocol generation, and LLM-judged error reasoning; or generate the responses.

PKU-YuanGroup/OpenAI4S · 46 tokens

alphafold2

Predict protein structure for monomers and multimers with AlphaFold2 via the ColabFold runner (Mirdita et al. 2022, github.com/sokrypton/ColabFold; AlphaFold2 Jumper et al. 2021). Reach for this skill to fold a sequence or complex with the AF2/AF2-Multimer evoformer, to validate designed sequences by self-consistency…

PKU-YuanGroup/OpenAI4S · 117 tokens

bio-alignment-msa-parsing

Parse and analyze multiple sequence alignments using Biopython. Extract sequences, identify conserved regions, analyze gaps, work with annotations, and manipulate alignment data for downstream analysis. Use when parsing or manipulating multiple sequence alignments.

PKU-YuanGroup/OpenAI4S · 52 tokens

bio-causal-genomics-heritability-partitioning

Estimates SNP heritability and partitions it across functional annotations, cell types, and loci from GWAS summary statistics or individual-level genotypes. Implements LDSC, stratified LDSC with the baseline-LD model, Finucane 2018 cell-type prioritization, LDAK SumHer, HDL, HESS local heritability, BOLT-REML…

PKU-YuanGroup/OpenAI4S · 186 tokens