pubmed-database

pubmed-database is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from synthetic-sciences/openscience. It costs 58 tokens per session (3,623 once invoked), scanned A, original, Apache-2.0.

A connection to PubMed, the U.S. National Library of Medicine's searchable database of biomedical and life-science research articles.

In plain words
What is it for?
Building Boolean or MeSH searches, finding articles by author or date, retrieving abstracts and citations, and supporting systematic reviews.
Why use it?
It makes detailed literature searches and citation retrieval repeatable from code instead of relying only on manual web searches.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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

Good fit Building Boolean or MeSH searches, finding articles by author or date, retrieving abstracts and citations, and supporting systematic reviews.

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Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/synthetic-sciences/openscience/pubmed-database
About the project

synthetic-sciences/openscience is an AI workbench that carries out scientific research by reading papers, forming hypotheses, writing and running code, conducting experiments, analyzing results, and preparing reports. Researchers use it for work in machine learning, biology, physics, and chemistry with remote or local models. Catalogue add-ons extend its scientific workflows through skills and instructions.

synthetic-sciences/openscience · 3,501 stars · on GitHub · openscience.sh

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 synthetic-sciences/openscience --skill pubmed-database
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/synthetic-sciences/openscience

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 pubmed-database

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/synthetic-sciences/openscience/pubmed-database.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/synthetic-sciences/openscience/pubmed-database)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/synthetic-sciences/openscience/pubmed-database"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/synthetic-sciences/openscience/pubmed-database.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 58 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,623 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. 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 $0.00058 $0.03623
Opus 5 $0.00029 $0.01811
Sonnet 5 $0.00012 $0.00725
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00362

Measured 4d ago against content hash 655becc52a82, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

pubmed-database 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 4d 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.

Makes network callslowCapability

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

response = requests.get(search_url, params=params)
Origin

Copies of this mod

7 near-identical copies found in the catalogue:

backend/cli/skills/databases/pubmed-database/SKILL.md · 460 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 460 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

PubMed Database

Overview

PubMed is the U.S. National Library of Medicine's comprehensive database providing free access to MEDLINE and life sciences literature. Construct advanced queries with Boolean operators, MeSH terms, and field tags, access data programmatically via E-utilities API for systematic reviews and literature analysis.

When to Use This Skill

This skill should be used when:

  • Searching for biomedical or life sciences research articles
  • Constructing complex search queries with Boolean operators, field tags, or MeSH terms
  • Conducting systematic literature reviews or meta-analyses
  • Accessing PubMed data programmatically via the E-utilities API
  • Finding articles by specific criteria (author, journal, publication date, article type)
  • Retrieving citation information, abstracts, or full-text articles
  • Working with PMIDs (PubMed IDs) or DOIs
  • Creating automated workflows for literature monitoring or data extraction

Core Capabilities

1. Advanced Search Query Construction

Construct sophisticated PubMed queries using Boolean operators, field tags, and specialized syntax.

Basic Search Strategies:

  • Combine concepts with Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT)
  • Use field tags to limit searches to specific record parts
  • Employ phrase searching with double quotes for exact matches
  • Apply wildcards for term variations
  • Use proximity searching for terms within specified distances

Example Queries:

# Recent systematic reviews on diabetes treatment
diabetes mellitus[mh] AND treatment[tiab] AND systematic review[pt] AND 2023:2024[dp]

# Clinical trials comparing two drugs
(metformin[nm] OR insulin[nm]) AND diabetes mellitus, type 2[mh] AND randomized controlled trial[pt]

# Author-specific research
smith ja[au] AND cancer[tiab] AND 2023[dp] AND english[la]

When to consult search_syntax.md:

  • Need comprehensive list of available field tags
  • Require detailed explanation of search operators
  • Constructing complex proximity searches
  • Understanding automatic term mapping behavior
  • Need specific syntax for date ranges, wildcards, or special characters

Read the full file on GitHub · 460 lines

Files

What ships with it

3 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. 4d ago First seen · 460 lines · 58 tokens per session scan A 655becc52a82

Subscribe to this mod's changes

pubmed-database is a skill published in the GitHub repository synthetic-sciences/openscience (3,501 stars, last pushed today), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 58 tokens to every session and 3,623 once invoked, about $0.0003 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 2026-09-03.