literature-engine

literature-engine is a skill for Claude Code from TobiasBlask/open-paper-machine. It costs 93 tokens per session (3,124 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide for finding, organizing, reviewing, and combining academic research papers. It uses scholarly databases and methods such as citation-based snowballing, which means following references and papers that cite a useful study.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to build search queries, find papers through academic databases, remove duplicates, screen studies, create concept comparisons, write a literature synthesis, and track new publications.
Why use it?
Research searches can miss relevant work, include duplicates, or become difficult to summarize consistently. This guide provides a repeatable process for searching, screening, comparing, and monitoring literature.

Skill for Claude Code

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

Part of the open-academic-paper-machine plugin — 33 skills, 21 commands, 4 agents shipped together

Good fit Use it to build search queries, find papers through academic databases, remove duplicates, screen studies, create concept comparisons, write a literature synthesis, and track new publications.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/tobiasblask/open-paper-machine/literature-engine
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 TobiasBlask/open-paper-machine --skill literature-engine
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/TobiasBlask/open-paper-machine

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install open-academic-paper-machine, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 33 skills, 21 commands, 4 agents.

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-engine

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/tobiasblask/open-paper-machine/literature-engine/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/tobiasblask/open-paper-machine/literature-engine)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/tobiasblask/open-paper-machine/literature-engine"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/tobiasblask/open-paper-machine/literature-engine/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-engine

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/tobiasblask/open-paper-machine/literature-engine"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/tobiasblask/open-paper-machine/literature-engine.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 93 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,124 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 $0.00093 $0.03124
Opus 5 $0.00046 $0.01562
Sonnet 5 $0.00019 $0.00625
Haiku 4.5 $0.00009 $0.00312

Measured 10d ago against content hash cab64f7c7852, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-10, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

literature-engine 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 10d 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/literature-engine/SKILL.md · 347 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 347 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Orchestration Log: When this skill is activated, append a log entry to outputs/orchestration_log.md:

### Skill Activation: Literature Engine
**Timestamp:** [current date/time]
**Actor:** AI Agent (literature-engine)
**Input:** [brief description of the search/synthesis request]
**Output:** [brief description of results — e.g., "47 papers found across 4 databases, deduplicated to 38"]

Literature Engine

Data Source Priority — STRICT

  1. Academic APIs via scripts/academic_search.py — ALWAYS first
    • Semantic Scholar (200M+ papers): citation graphs, TLDR, snowballing
    • OpenAlex (474M+ works): broadest coverage, German publications, CC0
    • CrossRef (150M+ works): DOI resolution, journal metadata
    • arXiv (2.4M+ preprints): CS/AI/ML cutting-edge
  2. Web search — ONLY for: VHB-JOURQUAL rankings, specific CFPs, conference info
  3. Firecrawl — LAST RESORT for sources without APIs (AIS eLibrary, specific repositories)

Search Strategy

Step 1: Query Construction

For any research topic, construct 4-6 search queries:

Query Type Purpose Example (GenAI/Agents paper)
Core English Main topic "generative AI enterprise implementation"
Synonym English Alternative terms "large language models organizational adoption"
Narrow English Specific aspect "autonomous AI agents business process"
Adjacent English Related field "AI transformation strategy organizational change"
German German publications "generative KI Unternehmen Implementierung"
Theoretical Theory-specific "sociotechnical systems artificial intelligence"

Step 2: Execute Search

from scripts.academic_search import search_all, search_semantic_scholar, search_openalex, snowball, deduplicate_papers, papers_to_csv, papers_to_bibtex_file

# Round 1: Broad multi-API search
papers = search_all("generative AI enterprise implementation", 
                    max_results_per_source=20, year_from=2020)
papers += search_all("autonomous AI agents organizational", 
                     max_results_per_source=20, year_from=2020)
papers += search_all("LLM adoption business strategy", 
                     max_results_per_source=15, year_from=2022)

# Round 2: German sources via OpenAlex
papers += search_openalex("generative KI Implementierung Unternehmen", 
                          max_results=15, year_from=2020)

# Deduplicate
papers = deduplicate_papers(papers)
print(f"After dedup: {len(papers)} unique papers")

Read the full file on GitHub · 347 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. 10d ago First seen · 347 lines · 93 tokens per session scan A cab64f7c7852

Subscribe to this mod's changes

literature-engine is a skill published in the GitHub repository TobiasBlask/open-paper-machine (18 stars, last pushed 5mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 93 tokens to every session and 3,124 once invoked, about $0.0005 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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