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Research Literature Review

Searches and summarizes academic papers across local PDFs, Zotero, Obsidian, and the web

Source Download skill
Repository
wanshuiyin/Auto-claude-code-research-in-sleep
Stars
18,482
Licence
MIT
Files
1 file

What it does

Once installed, the agent can search for academic papers on a topic, check your local PDF folders and optional reference managers, and summarize key ideas and related work. It works through a prioritized list of sources (local PDFs, Zotero, Obsidian, web search by default) and can add extra academic databases such as Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, or DeepXiv only when you explicitly name them. It can also fetch arXiv metadata, with downloads turned off by default.

Great for

  • Graduate students or researchers starting a literature review
  • Anyone who wants a quick overview of what a paper or topic covers
  • People who keep papers in a local folder or Zotero and want the agent to search them

Skip it if

  • Final citation-accurate bibliographies, since summaries from the skill may be incomplete or wrong and should be checked against the original papers
  • Confidential or unpublished documents sent to web or AI-based sources, because queries and content may leave your machine (the file references external services like Exa and Gemini)

Try asking

  • “Find papers and related work on diffusion models for image editing”
  • “Do a literature review on federated learning privacy from my papers/ folder”
  • “What does this paper say about attention mechanisms? (with PDF in literature/)”
  • “Search Zotero and local PDFs only for transformer scaling laws — sources: zotero, local”
Step-by-step guide: how to use Research Literature ReviewInstall, first run, examples, tips and FAQs

Install in 3 steps

  1. 1

    Download the skill

    The ZIP contains the 1 original files, the MIT licence and an attribution note.

    research-lit.zip
  2. 2

    Add it to your agent

    Claude Code (all projects)

    mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills && unzip research-lit.zip -d ~/.claude/skills/

    Claude Code / Agent SDK (this project only)

    mkdir -p .claude/skills && unzip research-lit.zip -d .claude/skills/

    Claude apps (web/desktop): Settings → Capabilities → Skills → Upload skill, and choose the ZIP.

  3. 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

  • Put your PDFs in a papers/ or literature/ folder in the project, or set a custom path under '## Paper Library' in AGENTS.md, so the agent finds them.
  • Name sources explicitly (for example sources: web, semantic-scholar) to control which services receive your query.
  • Treat the output as a starting point and verify key claims against the original paper.

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.