Literature Search

Literature Search is an AI Engineering skill for Claude Code, published by gaasher in Agent-Loop-Skills.

166 stars19 forkson gaasher/Agent-Loop-SkillsAdded 2026/09/08+2% in starsRepository updated 2026/06/30

agent-skillsagentic-loopsagentic-workflowsai-agentsanthropicautoresearchclaudeclaude-codedata-analysisliterature-reviewllm-agentsmachine-learningml-autoresearchopen-sourceprompt-engineeringred-teamingscientific-writingskillssubagents

Install in seconds

Install Literature Search

Copy Literature Search into your Claude Code skills folder. Run the command in your terminal, or review the source on GitHub before installing.

terminal

npx degit https://github.com/gaasher/Agent-Loop-Skills/tree/main/loops/literature-search ~/.claude/skills/literature-search

Requires Node.js. Downloads this skill only — not the rest of the repository — into your Claude Code skills folder.

Without Node.js

git clone https://github.com/gaasher/Agent-Loop-Skills.git

Clones the whole repository, then copy the skill’s own directory into your skills folder yourself.

In this catalog

Source file: loops/literature-search/SKILL.md in gaasher/Agent-Loop-Skills
Installs to: ~/.claude/skills/literature-search
Collection: One of 25 skills cataloged from this repository
Category: AI Engineering — 3670 skills

What Literature Search does

Literature Search provides a shared CLI for discovering papers, checking novelty, searching full text, and walking citation graphs. Use it when a loop needs scholarly literature or experimental-result extraction and should fall back cleanly to web search if needed.

Literature Search is cataloged under AI Engineering on DirSkills. Literature Search comes from a repository tagged agent-skills, agentic-loops, agentic-workflows, ai-agents and anthropic.

Documentation

README

Excerpt

Literature Search (shared toolchain)

This skill is not a loop — it is the literature-retrieval dependency several loops use for paper discovery and novelty checks. It bundles tools/lit_search.py (a stdlib-only entrypoint) and the tools/lit/ package: Semantic Scholar (S2) for semantic search + snippets + the citation graph and arXiv for full-text reads (the keyless core), plus optional OpenAlex, Perplexity Sonar (ask), and bgpt.pro (bgpt) when their keys are set. Every subcommand prints JSON; on a terminal failure it prints {"error","fallback"} and exits non-zero so the caller degrades to its built-in WebSearch/WebFetch. No installs, Python ≥3.9.

How a loop uses it

This is the opening of the README. Read the full README on GitHub.

Frequently asked about Literature Search

What else does gaasher publish alongside Literature Search?
Literature Search is one of 25 skills that DirSkills catalogs from gaasher/Agent-Loop-Skills, the repository it ships in. Its siblings there include Alpha Evolve, Anomaly Investigation and Blue Team. Each one is a separate skill with its own page in this directory, installs the same way Literature Search does, and is maintained by gaasher in that same repository. The rest of the collection is listed on the gaasher/Agent-Loop-Skills page.
How does Literature Search compare to other AI Engineering skills?
Literature Search ranks #3331 by stars among the 3670 AI Engineering skills in this catalog. The most-starred ones next to it are Architecture Decision Records, AI-First Engineering and Agentic OS. DirSkills ranks by the star count of the repository each skill ships in, so that order reflects how popular those repositories are rather than any review of Literature Search against them. Open each page to compare what they document and how they install.