papers-skill

Papers Skill

Overview

Papers Skill turns a coding agent into a literature-research assistant. It orchestrates a bundled Python CLI (scripts/papers.py) that hits the free Semantic Scholar and arXiv APIs, downloads arXiv PDFs, and extracts text with PyMuPDF. The agent decides which subcommand to invoke and how to combine results into a literature scan, a deep read of one paper, an impact analysis, or a reading list.

This skill is the Skill-mode port of the papers-mcp MCP server by the same author. Both projects share the same feature set; this one ships as a Claude Code plugin so it can be installed with a single command and needs no long-running MCP process.

When to Use This Skill

• Use when the user asks to search academic papers by topic, author, or venue.
• Use when the user names a specific paper (by DOI, arXiv ID, or title) and

wants metadata, the abstract, the TL;DR, or its reference list.

• Use when the user wants to find work that cites a known paper (impact

analysis, follow-up tracking).

• Use when the user wants to download an arXiv PDF and have it summarized.
• Use when the user asks to build a reading list around a topic.

Do Not Use This Skill When

• The user wants paywalled non-arXiv full text. This skill cannot bypass

publisher paywalls; it can only fetch arXiv PDFs and metadata everywhere.

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