Paper Lookup (Claude Skill)

Search 10 academic paper databases via REST APIs for research papers, preprints, and scholarly articles.

   
Type Claude Skill
Supplier K-Dense Inc. (community OSS)
Availability GA — part of the actively maintained K-Dense scientific-agent-skills collection
Pricing Free / OSS — license not stated upstream
Capabilities Read/Write — Claude runs the skill’s Python locally (Bash), not as an MCP tool

How to install

  • Claude Code / Claude.ai — Skills CLI (recommended): 
    npx skills add K-Dense-AI/scientific-agent-skills

    Installs the K-Dense collection; enable the paper-lookup skill when prompted. Works across Claude Code, Cursor, and Codex via the Agent Skills spec (requires Node ≥ 18).

  • Claude Code / Claude Desktop — manual clone: 
    git clone https://github.com/K-Dense-AI/scientific-agent-skills
cp -r scientific-agent-skills/skills/paper-lookup ~/.claude/skills/

    Project-scoped alternative: copy into .claude/skills/ instead of ~/.claude/skills/. The skill declares its own Python dependencies in its SKILL.md; install them (the K-Dense skills generally use uv / pip) when prompted on first use.

What it does

Search 10 academic paper databases via REST APIs for research papers, preprints, and scholarly articles. Covers PubMed, PMC (full text), bioRxiv, medRxiv, arXiv, OpenAlex, Crossref, Semantic Scholar, CORE, Unpaywall. Use when searching for papers, citations, DOI/PMID lookups, abstracts, full text, open access, preprints, citation graphs, author search, or any scholarly literature query. Triggers on mentions of any supported database or requests like “find papers on X” or “look up this DOI”.

Primary use cases: searching for papers, citations, DOI/PMID lookups, abstracts, full text, open access, preprints, citation graphs, author search, or any scholarly literature query.

Notes

Distributed as a SKILL.md (plus code examples) in the K-Dense collection — Claude executes it locally via Bash/Python rather than as an MCP server. Upstream license: not stated upstream. The skill name to enable after install is paper-lookup.

Sources

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