The gist

Academic Research Skills is an open-source suite of AI agents for the Claude Code environment, built by GitHub user Imbad0202. It addresses the tedious parts of academic work by automating tasks like reference hunting, citation formatting, and consistency checking. This allows researchers to focus on core intellectual challenges like defining research questions, choosing methodologies, and interpreting results, rather than administrative grunt work. The tool emphasizes human-in-the-loop collaboration to avoid common AI failure modes.

What it does

Conducts literature reviews with a 13-agent team, using Socratic guidance and Semantic Scholar API verification.
Drafts academic papers with personal style calibration, citation conversion, and LaTeX formatting.
Performs multi-perspective peer reviews using a 7-agent team with quantitative quality rubrics.
Orchestrates a 10-stage research pipeline with integrity gates to detect fabricated references and statistical errors.
Verifies claims against cited sources to reduce citation hallucinations and assess claim faithfulness.
Manages experiment provenance by linking manuscript claims to externally-run experiment records.

How it works

This tool operates as a plugin for the Claude Code CLI, VS Code, or JetBrains IDEs. Users interact via text commands, like /ars-plan, to initiate tasks. The system uses ensembles of AI agents to process requests, generating outputs such as literature reviews, formatted paper drafts (Markdown, DOCX, PDF), and peer review reports. It is free and open-source, requiring users to provide their own Anthropic API key for a pay-as-you-go cost model.

Best for

This tool is best for academic researchers and students comfortable with a command-line interface who want an AI-powered assistant to manage the entire lifecycle of a research paper within the Claude Code ecosystem.

Watch out for

Setup requires the Claude Code CLI and some technical configuration, including Git Bash for full functionality on Windows. While core features are prompt-driven, some optional guards and utilities require a real Python interpreter to be installed.