Best academic research skills for Claude Code and Codex

Literature reviews, citation management, and peer-review prep are exactly the kind of slow, structured work AI coding agents handle well, but only with the right skill loaded. The strongest option today is the academic-paper pipeline, and a full research stack fits in five installs.

Key takeaways

• academic-paper by imbad0202 leads the category with 6,505 installs and 38,127 GitHub stars (skills.sh registry, GitHub), running a 12-agent writing pipeline with 10 modes, 6 paper types, and 5 citation formats.
• academic-paper-reviewer (5,973 installs, same repo) simulates a full peer-review panel on a manuscript before you submit, and deep-research (4,601 installs) produces annotated bibliographies with documented search strategies.
• The queries developers actually search, like "academic research skills for codex", resolve to the same catalog: academic-research-suite (632 installs, 6,424 stars) is the Codex-packaged variant of the same toolchain.
• For citations, nature-citation (3,801 installs, 29,211 stars) maps manuscript claims to Nature Portfolio style references and exports Zotero RDF, RIS, or ENW without inventing metadata.
• Skillselion indexes 61,051 skills totaling 134.6M installs (catalog stats, 2026-07-17); the research cluster sits mostly in the docs and AI agents categories.

What is the best academic research skill for Claude Code?

The best academic research skill is academic-paper by imbad0202, with 6,505 installs and 38,127 GitHub stars (skills.sh registry, GitHub). It is a 12-agent academic paper writing pipeline with 10 modes covering full drafts, outlines, revision coaching, abstracts, literature reviews, citation checks, and AI-disclosure statements, across 6 paper types and 5 citation formats, with LaTeX, DOCX, and PDF output.

npx skills add imbad0202/academic-research-skills --skill academic-paper

Two strong alternatives from the same 38,127-star repo: academic-paper-reviewer (5,973 installs) simulates an academic peer-review panel on your manuscript, and academic-pipeline (4,331 installs) audits claim faithfulness by verifying every cited assertion against the retrieved reference text. Browse the wider category on the best skills for AI agents pillar.

Do academic research skills work with Codex?

Yes. Agent skills are plain SKILL.md files plus scripts, so the same skill runs in Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor. The clearest example is academic-research-suite (632 installs, 6,424 stars), packaged by the same author specifically for Codex users: it searches literature, summarizes findings, and structures academic inquiries for literature reviews and hypothesis formation. If you work in Codex day to day, the OpenAI Codex skills guide covers setup in detail, and the official docs live at developers.openai.com/codex.

Which skill handles literature reviews best?

For literature reviews the top pick is literature-review by lingzhi227 (2,981 installs), which generates expert personas and focused discussion prompts to force multi-perspective analysis before you commit to a thesis. For a stricter, reproducible process, systematic-literature-review from ByteDance's deer-flow repo (1,397 installs, 77,234 stars) runs structured synthesis over the most relevant recent papers instead of scattered ad-hoc searches. Both fit naturally alongside deep-research (4,601 installs), which documents its search strategy so results can be re-run and defended.

How do you manage citations with an AI coding agent?

Citation work splits across two purpose-built skills. nature-citation (3,801 installs, 29,211 stars) segments manuscript claims, maps each to a reference in Nature Portfolio style, and exports Zotero RDF, RIS, or ENW files while refusing to fabricate metadata. citation-management (1,472 installs) automatically finds and harvests citations for statements in a LaTeX paper or technical report. Anthropic's own documentation on agent skills explains the SKILL.md format these are built on at anthropic.com.

A complete starter stack

• academic-paper (6,505 installs) - the 12-agent writing pipeline, from outline to formatted PDF.
• academic-paper-reviewer (5,973 installs) - simulated peer review before submission.
• deep-research (4,601 installs) - reproducible literature search with annotated bibliographies.
• literature-review (2,981 installs) - multi-perspective synthesis of sources.
• nature-citation (3,801 installs) - claim-to-reference mapping with clean citation exports.

Common pitfalls

• Installing a writing skill but skipping a verification one: without academic-pipeline or nature-citation, agents will happily cite papers that do not say what the draft claims.
• Searching for "codex skills" and assuming a separate ecosystem exists: the SKILL.md format is shared, so install the highest-signal skill regardless of which agent it was packaged for.
• Letting the agent run a literature review in one giant prompt instead of a skill-driven pipeline: reproducibility disappears and so does your search documentation.

Install counts from the skills.sh leaderboard, snapshot 2026-07-17. Start with academic-paper, add a reviewer skill, and your research workflow gets a real pipeline instead of a chat transcript.

Common questions