Scientific Critical Thinking (Claude Skill)

Evaluate scientific claims and evidence quality.

   
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 (MIT)
Capabilities Read/Write — Claude runs the skill’s Python locally (Bash), not as an MCP tool

How to install

  • Also packaged in the SciAgent-Skills collection (jaechang-hits (community OSS, CC BY 4.0)): clone jaechang-hits/SciAgent-Skills and run /plugin install sciagent-skills in Claude Code (or copy skills/scientific-writing/scientific-critical-thinking into ~/.claude/skills/).
  • Claude Code / Claude.ai — Skills CLI (recommended): 
    npx skills add K-Dense-AI/scientific-agent-skills

    Installs the K-Dense collection; enable the scientific-critical-thinking 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/scientific-critical-thinking ~/.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

Evaluate scientific claims and evidence quality. Use for assessing experimental design validity, identifying biases and confounders, applying evidence grading frameworks (GRADE, Cochrane Risk of Bias), or teaching critical analysis. Best for understanding evidence quality, identifying flaws. For formal peer review writing use peer-review.

Primary use cases: assessing experimental design validity, identifying biases and confounders, applying evidence grading frameworks (GRADE, Cochrane Risk of Bias), or teaching critical analysis.

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: MIT. The skill name to enable after install is scientific-critical-thinking.

Sources

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