claude-scholar

claude-scholar

Academic research tools for Claude Code. Literature search, citation management, LaTeX checks, math verification, manuscript critique, and submission preparation. These tools assist with formatting and verification—they do not generate original research content. Please check your venue's AI use policy for guidance on whether and how to use these tools.

Note: These skills are early-stage and not comprehensively tested. Proceed with caution!

Privacy: Some skills send manuscript content, figures, or bibliographic data to AI model providers and external APIs. Read PRIVACY.md to understand what data goes where, and discuss with your co-authors before using this plugin on shared work.

Basic principle for skill development and inclusion

Don't overbuild. Foundation models and agent harnesses are getting better fast, and overbuilt structure becomes a maintenance burden that constrains the base model rather than helping it. These skills exist only where they add something Claude can't quickly or easily do on its own: calling external APIs, running programmatic verification, or encoding multi-step checklists that are easy to forget. No skill for something Claude already handles well out of the box or will likely handle with minimal guidance or conversation.

Skills

Lookup

Single-purpose data retrieval from external sources.

Skill	Description
arxiv-metadata	Fetch structured metadata for arXiv papers (title, authors, date, categories, DOI)
doi-bibtex	Fetch BibTeX entries from DOIs and add to .bib files
openalex	Query and analyze 240M+ scholarly works via the OpenAlex API

Analysis

Inspect, verify, or critique artifacts — from programmatic checks to structured review.

Skill	Description
check-refs	Verify citation references in LaTeX papers against academic databases using bibsleuth
latex-cleanup	Review LaTeX documents for common issues, style consistency, typography, cross-references, and draft artifacts
verify-math	Verify mathematical derivations step-by-step using SymPy
critique-figures	Critique figures for format, colorblind safety, legibility, overplotting, and chart choice
critique-manuscript	Structured self-review of your manuscript

Workflow

Multi-step workflows — coordinating checks, preparing submissions, or transforming documents.

Skill	Description
presubmit-checks	Pre-submission checklist — references, LaTeX cleanup, build, figure format, and front matter
arxiv-prep	Prepare an arXiv submission package — clean source, compile, extract metadata, create tarball
accessible-pdf	Make LaTeX documents produce accessible tagged PDFs (PDF/UA-1, PDF/A-2b) — non-destructive copy + LuaLaTeX build

Skill details

Lookup

arxiv-metadata

Fetches structured metadata from arXiv given an arXiv ID or URL — title, authors, date, categories, DOI. Handles multiple ID formats (new and old-style). Mainly used by other skills and agents rather than invoked directly.

doi-bibtex

Given a DOI (bare or full URL), fetches the BibTeX entry and appends it to the project's .bib file, checking for duplicates. Simple utility — mainly invoked by Claude when adding references.

openalex

Queries the OpenAlex API (240M+ scholarly works) for literature searches, citation analysis, and bibliometric queries. The helper script handles rate limiting, retries, and pagination. No API key required.

Analysis

check-refs

Verifies that every citation in a LaTeX paper exists in academic databases, flags suspicious entries, and suggests missing DOIs/URLs. Uses bibsleuth. Can run standalone or as part of presubmit-checks.

latex-cleanup

Systematic review of LaTeX documents for common issues: style consistency, typography, cross-references, draft artifacts, debugging code. Identifies all .tex files in the project (including \input/\include targets) and flags problems.

verify-math

Step-by-step verification of mathematical derivations using SymPy. Each derivation step is validated programmatically — useful for catching algebra and calculus errors in proofs and equations.

critique-figures

Critiques academic figures using a mix of programmatic checks and vision analysis. Checks file format and resolution (flags raster exports of plots/charts, detects bitmap-in-PDF wrappers), colorblind risk (red-green reliance), excessive categories, font legibility, overplotted scatterplots, and dynamite plots. Handles multi-panel figures by evaluating each panel individually. Resolves figures from \includegraphics references in the TeX tree. Report-only — does not modify figures.

critique-manuscript