Researching papers

Skill alainator/worldcodex/.claude/skills/researching-papers

Claude Code skill suite for worldbuilding with scientific rigor. 19 skills, 5 commands, 3 agents, research tool. Includes derivation-chain civilization pipeline, communication medium taxonomy, and epistemological framework.

Install

npx -y skills add alainator/worldcodex --skill researching-papers

Assembled from the repository path, not quoted from the project. Check it against their README if it does not work.

One thing to look at

1 stars1 stars. Stars are a popularity signal and not a quality one, but at this level it is likely that nobody has read this closely except its author, and you would be relying on your own review.

What its author says it does

Copied from the file, not written here

Searches academic databases (arXiv, Crossref, PMC, Semantic Scholar, Open Library, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) for papers matching a research query, downloads PDFs, and converts them to markdown. Use when grounding fictional science in real research, finding citations for existing content, or when user says "find papers", "search for research", "download papers", "what does real science say about", "ground this in research", "find citations", or "look up [scientific concept]". Does NOT map research onto canon formalism — use /integrating-research for that.

SKILL.md

3.3 KB, as published. Nobody here has run it

Researching Papers

Search open-access academic sources, download PDFs, and convert to markdown.

Tool

All commands use tools/research-tool.py:

# Search default sources (arXiv + Crossref + PMC + Unpaywall)
python3 tools/research-tool.py search "quantum time operator"
python3 tools/research-tool.py search "percolation theory" --source arxiv --max 10

# Search humanities (Semantic Scholar + Open Library + SEP + PhilPapers)
python3 tools/research-tool.py search "autopoiesis" --source humanities
python3 tools/research-tool.py search "structural realism" --source sep --download

# Search everything
python3 tools/research-tool.py search "recursive epistemology" --source all

# Download specific paper
python3 tools/research-tool.py download 2301.12345
python3 tools/research-tool.py download https://arxiv.org/pdf/2301.12345.pdf --title "Title"

# Fetch SEP entry by slug
python3 tools/research-tool.py fetch-sep structural-realism

# Convert PDF to markdown
python3 tools/research-tool.py convert _source/research/papers/paper-name.pdf
python3 tools/research-tool.py convert-all

# List and index
python3 tools/research-tool.py list
python3 tools/research-tool.py list --topic "collapse"
python3 tools/research-tool.py index

File Organization

_source/research/papers/ — original PDFs
_source/research/markdown/ — converted markdown
_source/research/sep-entries/ — Stanford Encyclopedia entries
_source/research/INDEX.md — catalog
_source/research/last-search-results.json — most recent results

Domain Strategies

Physics/Chemistry/Biology: Default sources. Prefer recent papers (2020+). Prioritize experimental results.

Philosophy/Foundations: Use --source humanities. Domains: philosophy of science, formal epistemology, systems theory, cognitive science.

Process

Identify the gap or concept needing grounding
Search appropriate sources
Read converted markdown in _source/research/markdown/ or sep-entries/
Present findings with relevance assessment
Hand off to /integrating-research for canon formalization

Citations

[Author, Year] inline with ## References section. Each entry includes a one-sentence annotation. Cited science is canon science — no disclaimers.

Configuration

Set your contact email for polite API access:

export RESEARCH_TOOL_EMAIL="[email protected]"

Requires pdftotext (poppler-utils) or pypdf for PDF conversion.

Out of Scope

Does NOT map research onto canon formalism (use /integrating-research). Does NOT write science files (use /writing-science). Does NOT audit existing citations (use /auditing-canon).