Research Papers Skill

Analyze research papers and extract key information for your literature review. Acts as a Research Assistant with integrated Paper Summarizer capabilities.

Overview

This skill helps you:

• Analyze PDF papers and extract structured summaries
• Search for relevant papers on topics
• Extract key contributions and methodology
• Compare papers against related work
• Generate citation context

Commands

/research-papers <query_or_path>

Analyze papers or search for relevant research.

Parameters:

• query_or_path (required): Either a search query string or path to PDF/directory

Input Types:

• Query string: Searches for relevant papers on topic
• File path: Analyzes specific PDF file
• Directory path: Analyzes all materials in directory

Paper Analysis Capabilities

Key Information Extraction

• Problem Statement: What problem does the paper address?
• Key Contributions: Novel methods or findings
• Methodology: Technical approach and algorithms
• Results: Main experimental findings
• Limitations: Acknowledged weaknesses
• Citation Context: How to cite this work in your paper

Comparative Analysis

• Compare against related work
• Identify differences from baselines
• Extract improvement claims

Code Analysis Capabilities

When analyzing code repositories:

• Understand code structure and key components
• Map implementations to methodology descriptions
• Extract variable names, hyperparameters, and algorithm steps

Examples

# Search for papers on a topic
/research-papers "transformer attention mechanisms"

# Analyze a specific PDF
/research-papers research/attention_is_all_you_need.pdf

# Analyze all papers in a directory
/research-papers research/baselines/

# Analyze code repository
/research-papers code/models/

Output Format

Returns structured summary including:

• Problem statement
• Key contributions
• Methodology overview
• Main results
• Suggested citation context
• Relevant quotes and key figures

Organizing Research Materials

Recommended structure:

research/
├── core/                    # Papers central to your method
│   ├── vaswani2017attention.pdf
│   └── devlin2019bert.pdf
├── baselines/               # Methods you compare against
│   ├── lstm_baseline.pdf
│   └── cnn_baseline.pdf
├── related/                 # Broader related work
│   ├── survey_transformers.pdf
│   └── applications.pdf
├── datasets/                # Dataset papers
│   └── imagenet.pdf
└── notes/                   # Your analysis notes
    ├── paper_comparisons.md
    └── key_takeaways.md

Effective Research Queries

# For related work section
/research-papers "graph neural networks survey"

# For specific technique
/research-papers "multi-head attention mechanism"

# For baselines
/research-papers "LSTM sequence modeling"

Integration with Other Skills

1. Research: Use research-papers to analyze papers
2. Citations: Use manage-citations to add papers to bibliography
3. Writing: Use write-section with --from research/ to incorporate findings
4. Review: Use review-paper to ensure proper coverage

Scripts Used

• ./pdf_reader.py - Extract and summarize PDFs

Platform Compatibility

Works on all platforms (Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, Gemini, Cursor). Command syntax may vary by platform - see platform-specific documentation in docs/.