Research Explorer

Research Explorer is an AI Engineering skill for Claude Code, published by ai4s-research in ai4s-skills.

204 stars19 forkson ai4s-research/ai4s-skillsAdded 2026/09/05Repository updated 2026/07/28

agent-skillsai-agentai-for-scienceai-scientistai4sclaude-codeclaude-skillsliterature-reviewopen-scienceopencodepaper-writingreproducible-researchresearch-toolsscientific-research

Install in seconds

Install Research Explorer

Copy Research Explorer 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/ai4s-research/ai4s-skills/tree/main/skills/research-explorer ~/.claude/skills/research-explorer

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/ai4s-research/ai4s-skills.git

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

In this catalog

Source file: skills/research-explorer/SKILL.md in ai4s-research/ai4s-skills
Installs to: ~/.claude/skills/research-explorer
Collection: One of 7 skills cataloged from this repository
Category: AI Engineering — 3101 skills

What Research Explorer does

Research Explorer helps turn a broad research direction into candidate topics with feasibility and innovation scoring. It also gathers a 20–30 paper pre-survey when the user needs a research landscape overview.

Research Explorer is cataloged under AI Engineering on DirSkills. Research Explorer comes from a repository tagged agent-skills, ai-agent, ai-for-science, ai-scientist and ai4s.

Documentation

README

Excerpt

Research Explorer

Overview

Research-topic exploration SKILL. Takes a broad direction, performs multi-dimensional web research with the agent's own WebSearch / WebFetch tools, and produces three structured Markdown deliverables. Single stage, full quality from the start. No Python runtime, no LLM SDK.

When to Use

User says "I want to research X" without a specific topic.
User wants to know "what are the hot topics in X".
User needs help narrowing a broad field into 5–10 candidate topics.
User asks for "research landscape overview".

When NOT to Use

User already has a specific research question → use literature-survey or paper-writer.
User wants a quick fact-check → use WebSearch directly.

Workflow

Step 1 — Understand the direction

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

Frequently asked about Research Explorer

What else does ai4s-research publish alongside Research Explorer?
Research Explorer is one of 7 skills that DirSkills catalogs from ai4s-research/ai4s-skills, the repository it ships in. Its siblings there include AI4S Agent, Experiment Suite and Integrity Auditor. Each one is a separate skill with its own page in this directory, installs the same way Research Explorer does, and is maintained by ai4s-research in that same repository. The rest of the collection is listed on the ai4s-research/ai4s-skills page.
How does Research Explorer compare to other AI Engineering skills?
Research Explorer ranks #2809 by stars among the 3101 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 Research Explorer against them. Open each page to compare what they document and how they install.