paper-discover

paper-discover is a skill for Claude Code from tuan3w/obsidian-vault-agent. It costs 58 tokens per session (1,648 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

An academic-paper discovery workflow for finding research related to a topic, paper, or note. It searches for relevant papers and can help identify gaps in a field of study.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to find papers about a topic, papers similar to one you already have, related work for a paper, or research areas that need more study.
Why use it?
Finding useful research manually can produce duplicates or an unfocused reading list. This narrows the search and checks existing notes before creating more.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: allowed-tools in frontmatter. Also seen: names the TodoWrite tool.

Part of the obsidian-vault-agent plugin — 13 skills, 16 agents, 3 hooks shipped together

Good fit Use it to find papers about a topic, papers similar to one you already have, related work for a paper, or research areas that need more study.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/tuan3w/obsidian-vault-agent/paper-discover
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 tuan3w/obsidian-vault-agent --skill paper-discover
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/tuan3w/obsidian-vault-agent

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install obsidian-vault-agent, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 13 skills, 16 agents, 3 hooks.

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 paper-discover

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/tuan3w/obsidian-vault-agent/paper-discover/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/tuan3w/obsidian-vault-agent/paper-discover)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/tuan3w/obsidian-vault-agent/paper-discover"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/tuan3w/obsidian-vault-agent/paper-discover/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 paper-discover

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/tuan3w/obsidian-vault-agent/paper-discover"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/tuan3w/obsidian-vault-agent/paper-discover.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" 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 1,648 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 $0.00058 $0.01648
Opus 5 $0.00029 $0.00824
Sonnet 5 $0.00012 $0.00330
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00165

Measured 11d ago against content hash 6a4fa7be83e6, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

paper-discover 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/search_papers.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.

skills/paper-discover/SKILL.md · 213 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 213 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

<Use_When>

  • User asks to find papers on a topic ("find papers about scaling laws")
  • User wants papers related to an existing note ("what papers connect to this?")
  • User is /processing a paper and wants to find related work
  • User asks "what should I read about X?"
  • User provides a DOI or paper title and wants similar papers
  • User wants to fill gaps in a knowledge domain </Use_When>

<Do_Not_Use_When>

  • User has a paper file to analyze (use /paper or /book-analyzer)
  • User wants to process an existing vault note (use /process)
  • User wants general web research, not academic papers (use /research) </Do_Not_Use_When>

<Execution_Policy>

  • Search first, present results, then create notes only if user approves
  • Always check vault for existing paper notes before creating duplicates
  • Rank by vault relevance, not just citation count
  • Cap at 10 results per search — quality over quantity
  • Respect Semantic Scholar rate limits (100 req/5min) </Execution_Policy>

Stage 1: PARSE QUERY AND CONTEXT

Determine the search mode from user input:

Mode A — Topic search (default): User provides a topic or question. Extract search terms.

"find papers about scaling laws for LLMs" → query: "scaling laws large language models"

Mode B — Similar papers: User references an existing vault note or provides a paper ID/DOI.

  1. Read the referenced note to extract title, key concepts
  2. Use the paper's Semantic Scholar ID or DOI for recommendations
  3. Fall back to keyword search if no ID available

Mode C — Gap filling: User asks about a domain. Search vault first to identify what's covered, then search for papers on uncovered subtopics.

Run the search script:

Read the full file on GitHub · 213 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 · 213 lines · 58 tokens per session scan A 6a4fa7be83e6

Subscribe to this mod's changes

paper-discover is a skill published in the GitHub repository tuan3w/obsidian-vault-agent (39 stars, last pushed 5mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 58 tokens to every session and 1,648 once invoked, about $0.0003 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.