research-skills

A small collection of research and academic-workflow skills for Claude — use them on the web (claude.ai), in the desktop app, or in Claude Code.

⚠️ For testing purposes only. The skills here are works-in-progress published for evaluation. They are not validated or supported for production or real research use — verify everything at the source before relying on it.

Skills

literature-search-pipeline

A guided, human-in-the-loop workflow for searching academic literature across every connected source at once. It runs in distinct phases with two mandatory review gates — you inspect and edit the concept blocks and the queries before any searching happens. In short, the pipeline:

1. Decomposes your question into PICO / thematic concept blocks (review gate 1).
2. Builds Boolean queries — synonyms, variant spellings, related terms, and a MeSH controlled-vocabulary variant (review gate 2).
3. Searches every available source simultaneously and deduplicates results.
4. Layers the search iteratively with a reproducible audit log (PRISMA-friendly).
5. Snowballs citations backward and forward from the strongest seed papers.
6. Verifies before trusting — only reports records a real tool call returned, and every record includes a working hyperlink to its source.

Installing

Most people use Claude on the web (claude.ai) or the desktop app — start there. Claude Code users can add the marketplace instead.

Claude Desktop & web (claude.ai)

The desktop app and claude.ai share the same Skills settings. They don't use the plugin marketplace — you upload the skill as a ZIP.

1. Turn on code execution. Go to Settings → Capabilities and enable "Code execution and file creation" (Skills require it). Custom-skill upload is available on Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise plans.
2. Get the skill ZIP. Download literature-search-pipeline.zip from this repo. (It's already packaged correctly — the ZIP contains a literature-search-pipeline/ folder with SKILL.md inside. If you build your own, keep that structure: the skill folder must be at the root of the ZIP, not the loose files.)
3. Upload it. Open Customize → Skills, click + Create skill (the + button), and upload the ZIP. Uploaded skills are private to your account and appear under Customize → Skills, where you can toggle or delete them.
4. Use it. Just ask a research question (e.g. "find the literature on X") — with the skill enabled, Claude invokes it automatically.

Team/Enterprise: an owner can also publish it org-wide from Organization settings → Skills.

Claude Code (CLI)

/plugin marketplace add dastorie/research-skills
/plugin install literature-search-pipeline@research-skills

Then ask a research question (e.g. "find the literature on X") and the skill triggers automatically.

Connected sources

The pipeline orchestrates external academic MCP servers. For full functionality you need some of these connected in your Claude environment:

• Consensus — natural-language search over peer-reviewed papers.
• OpenAlex — structured metadata, citation graphs, trends, author disambiguation.
• academic-search — regex queries and citation walks (PubMed / OpenAlex / Semantic Scholar providers).
• A library catalog MCP — referenced in the skill as a generic Library Catalog placeholder; substitute whatever institutional catalog MCP you have connected (its real tool names will differ).
• Zotero (optional) — capture the final set at the end.

If a source isn't connected, the skill says so and continues with the rest.

License

Provided as-is, with no warranty, for testing and evaluation only.