literature-review

literature-review is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from silverstein/claude-scientific-skills-desktop. It costs 86 tokens per session (4,666 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A structured method for reviewing research across academic databases such as PubMed, arXiv, bioRxiv, and Semantic Scholar. A literature review summarizes and compares existing studies on a question.

In plain words
What is it for?
It helps plan systematic, scoping, or meta-analysis reviews, synthesize findings, verify citations, and produce Markdown or PDF documents.
Why use it?
It reduces the manual work of finding relevant papers, checking citations, combining results, and identifying gaps in current knowledge.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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

Good fit It helps plan systematic, scoping, or meta-analysis reviews, synthesize findings, verify citations, and produce Markdown or PDF documents.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/silverstein/claude-scientific-skills-desktop/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 silverstein/claude-scientific-skills-desktop --skill literature-review
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/silverstein/claude-scientific-skills-desktop

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 literature-review

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/silverstein/claude-scientific-skills-desktop/literature-review/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/silverstein/claude-scientific-skills-desktop/literature-review)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/silverstein/claude-scientific-skills-desktop/literature-review"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/silverstein/claude-scientific-skills-desktop/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/silverstein/claude-scientific-skills-desktop/literature-review"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/silverstein/claude-scientific-skills-desktop/literature-review.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 86 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 4,666 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 $0.00086 $0.04666
Opus 5 $0.00043 $0.02333
Sonnet 5 $0.00017 $0.00933
Haiku 4.5 $0.00009 $0.00467

Measured 12d ago against content hash 850dbb4b821b, 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 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 12d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 3 executable files (scripts/generate_pdf.py, scripts/search_databases.py, scripts/verify_citations.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.

corpus/literature-review/SKILL.md · 547 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 547 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Literature Review

Overview

Conduct systematic, comprehensive literature reviews following rigorous academic methodology. Search multiple literature databases, synthesize findings thematically, verify all citations for accuracy, and generate professional output documents in markdown and PDF formats.

This skill integrates with multiple scientific skills for database access (gget, bioservices, datacommons-client) and provides specialized tools for citation verification, result aggregation, and document generation.

When to Use This Skill

Use this skill when:

  • Conducting a systematic literature review for research or publication
  • Synthesizing current knowledge on a specific topic across multiple sources
  • Performing meta-analysis or scoping reviews
  • Writing the literature review section of a research paper or thesis
  • Investigating the state of the art in a research domain
  • Identifying research gaps and future directions
  • Requiring verified citations and professional formatting

Core Workflow

Literature reviews follow a structured, multi-phase workflow:

Phase 1: Planning and Scoping

  1. Define Research Question: Use PICO framework (Population, Intervention, Comparison, Outcome) for clinical/biomedical reviews

    • Example: "What is the efficacy of CRISPR-Cas9 (I) for treating sickle cell disease (P) compared to standard care (C)?"
  2. Establish Scope and Objectives:

    • Define clear, specific research questions
    • Determine review type (narrative, systematic, scoping, meta-analysis)
    • Set boundaries (time period, geographic scope, study types)
  3. Develop Search Strategy:

    • Identify 2-4 main concepts from research question
    • List synonyms, abbreviations, and related terms for each concept
    • Plan Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT) to combine terms
    • Select minimum 3 complementary databases
  4. Set Inclusion/Exclusion Criteria:

    • Date range (e.g., last 10 years: 2015-2024)
    • Language (typically English, or specify multilingual)
    • Publication types (peer-reviewed, preprints, reviews)
    • Study designs (RCTs, observational, in vitro, etc.)
    • Document all criteria clearly

Read the full file on GitHub · 547 lines

Files

What ships with it

6 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 · 547 lines · 86 tokens per session scan A 850dbb4b821b

Subscribe to this mod's changes

literature-review is a skill published in the GitHub repository silverstein/claude-scientific-skills-desktop (22 stars, last pushed 5mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 86 tokens to every session and 4,666 once invoked, about $0.0004 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 2026-08-30.

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