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literature-search

75 / 100 · Review before installing

Check before installing. Some of what it can do is expected: a research skill usually looks things up on the internet.

By gaasher/Agent-Loop-Skills (GitHub) · research · 181 stars · scanned at commit f1169e6

Use when a loop needs scholarly literature — paper discovery, novelty checks, full-text snippet search, citation-graph traversal, single-paper reads, or experimental-result extraction. A shared, stdlib-only CLI (`tools/lit_search.py`) over Semantic Scholar + arXiv (plus optional OpenAlex, Perplexity Sonar, bgpt.pro), all JSON. Not a loop itself: install it alongside the loops and let any of them call it instead of vendoring their own copy. Degrades to the caller's WebSearch/WebFetch.

Works with any agent that supports SKILL.md skills.

What this skill can do

Safer alternatives

Low-risk skills in the same category (research) that look related. Check that one does what you need.

• 97 Low riskopenalex-literature-searchma-compbio-lab/SkillFoundry · 44 stars
• 80 Low riskliterature-searchssinder/bioinformatics-agent-skills · 75 stars
• 85 Low riskbgpt-paper-searchK-Dense-AI/claude-scientific-skills · 56,698 stars

Install

Paste this into your terminal. It downloads exactly the version we scanned, not whatever is newest.

if [ -e ~/.agents/skills/'literature-search' ] || [ -L ~/.agents/skills/'literature-search' ]; then echo 'A skill folder named literature-search already exists — not replacing it' >&2; false; else d=$(mktemp -d) && git clone --quiet --filter=blob:none --no-checkout 'https://github.com/gaasher/Agent-Loop-Skills' "$d" && git -C "$d" checkout --quiet 'f1169e6db0b0f8a83ced3a18562b7c57e14a748a' -- 'loops/literature-search' && mkdir -p ~/.agents/skills && cp -R "$d"/'loops/literature-search' ~/.agents/skills/'literature-search' && rm -rf "$d"; fi

Codex reads ~/.agents/skills directly. For Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, Gemini CLI, Antigravity or OpenCode, also link it. For Claude Code: ln -s ~/.agents/skills/'literature-search' ~/.claude/skills/'literature-search' (other agents: ~/.cursor/skills, ~/.copilot/skills, ~/.gemini/skills, ~/.gemini/config/skills, ~/.config/opencode/skills). Or install through the finder skill, which does both.

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