AlphaXiv Paper Lookup
Quickly summarize a single arXiv paper using AlphaXiv's LLM-optimized overviews, with deeper fallbacks.
- Stars
- 18,482
- Licence
- MIT
- Files
- 1 file
What it does
When you give the agent an arXiv link or paper ID and ask it to explain or summarize a paper, it fetches a condensed summary from AlphaXiv, a site that publishes machine-friendly paper overviews. If that is not enough, it falls back to the full paper text in markdown, and finally to the paper's LaTeX source from arXiv to answer detailed questions about equations or appendices. It is meant for understanding one paper, not for searching the literature.
Great for
- Researchers who want a fast explanation of one specific paper
- Students who paste an arXiv link and ask what it says
- People who need a quick answer about a single method or result
Skip it if
- Broad literature searches or topic surveys, since the skill itself says to use other skills such as /research-lit or /arxiv instead
- Anything needing verified citation metadata or venue information, because it relies on third-party summaries that may be inaccurate
- Papers AlphaXiv has not processed, where it will fall back to downloading and reading raw LaTeX, which is slower and uses more of the agent's context
Try asking
- “Explain this paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.12345”
- “Summarize arXiv 2401.12345 in plain language”
- “What does the appendix of 2401.12345 say about the proof? (forces LaTeX source depth)”
- “Give me the key points of this AlphaXiv link: https://www.alphaxiv.org/overview/2401.12345”
Install in 3 steps
- 1
Download the skill
The ZIP contains the 1 original files, the MIT licence and an attribution note.
alphaxiv.zip - 2
Add it to your agent
Claude Code (all projects)
mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills && unzip alphaxiv.zip -d ~/.claude/skills/Claude Code / Agent SDK (this project only)
mkdir -p .claude/skills && unzip alphaxiv.zip -d .claude/skills/Claude apps (web/desktop): Settings → Capabilities → Skills → Upload skill, and choose the ZIP.
- 3
Ask for the task
No special command needed — the agent reads the skill's description and loads it when your request matches. Try one of the prompts above.
Get better results
- Give a bare arXiv ID or full arXiv URL; version suffixes like v2 are stripped automatically.
- Add '- depth: src' to the request when you need equations or proofs, and expect a slower download.
- Review the Step 6 wiki ingest: it runs a Python script that writes into a research-wiki folder if one exists in the project.
What's inside
- SKILL.md
Redistributed unmodified from wanshuiyin/Auto-claude-code-research-in-sleep under the MIT licence. The assessment was drafted with AI from the skill's files on 2026-10-29. Skills can instruct your agent to run code — read SKILL.md and any scripts before installing.