Research & Search
Research agent skills teach AI agents to gather and synthesize information properly: literature reviews, competitive analysis, web research with citations, and structured summaries. Each SKILL.md encodes a method, not just a prompt, so results stay consistent across runs.
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jurgendn Bundle Gre Quant CoachCoach GRE Quantitative Reasoning — quantitative comparison tactics, problem-solving and data-interpretation strategy, content-gap triage, careless-error elimination, and timed drilling. Use this skill whenever the user works on GRE math ("quantitative comparison", "numeric entry", "why did I get this quant question wrong", "I keep making silly mistakes on quant", "GRE geometry/probability/percent review"), wants GRE-style quant practice sets, or asks how to get from a 160s score to a 168–170. Also use for quant pacing and calculator strategy. This is GRE test math (no calculus, no proofs) — for research-level math or ML theory use the theory-* or professor-mentor skills; for the verbal sections use gre-verbal-reasoning / gre-reading-comprehension.
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jurgendn Bundle Apply Cv BuilderBuild, revise, and restructure academic CVs for PhD applications, research master's programs, fellowships, research internships, RA roles, and lab applications. Use this skill whenever the user asks to turn a resume into an academic CV, improve research-experience bullets, organize publications/projects/teaching/awards, identify missing evidence for research readiness, or make a CV fit research admissions expectations.
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jurgendn Bundle Apply Sop WriterWrite, review, score, improve, or iterate on Statements of Purpose and PhD application essays for research programs. Use this skill whenever the user is applying to PhD programs, research internships, fellowships, or graduate programs and asks for SOP strategy, essay structure, research fit, faculty alignment, motivation framing, draft critique, or revision help. Every review and plan checks the statement against the programme's declared theme, specialisation, or track before faculty fit, searching the web for the live official programme page when the target is not already known. This skill is especially relevant for research-focused applications where the essay must connect prior work, future research direction, and program fit.
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jurgendn Bundle Ielts Learning PlannerBuild a personalised IELTS study plan with weekly schedules, skill-specific drills, and progress milestones. Use this skill when the user wants a study plan, asks how to prepare for IELTS, wants to know how to allocate study time across the four skills, or asks how to improve from their current band to their target band. Also use when the user asks how to use academic paper reading to improve IELTS Reading, wants to integrate reading research papers into their IELTS prep, or asks for a paper-reading routine. Integrates with ielts-reading-strategies, ielts-writing-task1, ielts-writing-task2, ielts-speaking-coach, and ielts-vocabulary-builder.
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jurgendn Bundle Apply Cv ReviewerDiagnose an academic CV the way an admissions committee reads it, before any rewriting. Use whenever the user asks to review, assess, critique, or find the weak spots in a CV for a PhD, research master's, fellowship, scholarship, or research internship — including "review my CV", "what will a committee think of this", "are my bullets strong enough", "is my CV too industry", "why does my CV look weak", or "grade my CV like an admissions committee". Decomposes every substantial experience into task, personal contribution, method, and outcome, grades bullets A–D against fixed anchors, and separates intrinsic strength from target relevance. Diagnosis is the deliverable; it rewrites only when the user asks after seeing the diagnosis. Distinct from apply-cv-builder, which builds and rewrites a CV and should be used after this one. Not a scored dossier verdict (apply-dossier-evaluator) and not a pass/fail on a finished artifact against a named bar (professor-critic) — this grades bullets in one CV at any stage.
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jurgendn Bundle Apply Profile ReaderRead an academic-career applicant profile from files, folders, notes, CVs, resumes, transcripts, research statements, project writeups, publication lists, GitHub summaries, recommendation notes, and target-school materials. Use this skill whenever the user asks Claude to read "my profile", "my application folder", "my CV and notes", "my PhD materials", "my academic background", or wants a reusable structured profile before SOP writing, academic CV building, professor emails, faculty/program fit mapping, recommender packets, or application-package audits. This skill is for academic career and research-application contexts; do not use it for generic job-search resumes, industry recruiter profiles, literature surveys, or writing a final SOP/CV directly.
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jurgendn Bundle Related Work WriterWrite or revise a Related Work section from a source-grounded literature map, annotated bibliography, paper list, or draft. Use this skill whenever the user asks to write related work inside an original research paper, position a paper against prior work, organize citations into themes, explain how their work differs from baselines or prior methods, avoid citation laundry lists, or calibrate novelty claims. This skill assumes the user has sources or a literature map; if they need to discover and verify the literature first, use literature-triangulation before this skill. If the user wants to write a standalone survey, tutorial, review, or perspective paper whose main contribution is the synthesis itself, use survey-paper-writer instead.
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jurgendn Skill Flow Idea To ProofOrchestrate the path from a raw research idea to a formal claim with a defensible proof design — drawing the hypothesis out of the idea, stating it as a precise theorem/claim, and designing (and auditing) the proof strategy. Use whenever the user says "help me turn this idea into a theorem", "I have a hunch, can we make it rigorous", "design a proof for this", "what would I need to prove this", "formalize this claim", "is this provable and how", or hands over an informal conjecture they want to develop into a formal result. This is a ROUTER that sequences existing singleton skills; it does not write the proof itself. Use flow-learn-new-topic or flow-deep-understanding when the goal is to understand existing work rather than formalize the user's own idea. Use gap-finder when the starting point is an existing paper's weakness rather than a fresh idea.
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jurgendn Skill Results WriteupTurn verified research findings into clear, calibrated scientific writing — paper sections (Results, Experiments, Discussion), lab notes, technical reports, and grant progress reports. Use this skill whenever the user has run experiments or analysis and wants help writing them up, including casual phrasings like "draft the results section", "write up these numbers", "turn my notebook into a paper section", or "summarize what we found". Also use when the user shares logs, tables, or a notebook and asks for prose. For reviewer-by-reviewer rebuttal strategy, use reviewer-response-strategist instead. The skill's main job is preventing confident-sounding overclaims and hallucinated numbers in scientific text.
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jurgendn Skill Theory To Toy CasesTurn abstract math or ML ideas into minimal examples, counterexamples, sanity checks, and tiny simulations. Use for theorem intuition, debugging derivations, constructing stress tests, converting a research idea into small checkable cases, or when a concept is too abstract or a claim needs intuition or falsification.
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jurgendn Skill Apply Motivation KeeperHelp a PhD student recover motivation, reframe setbacks, and rebuild momentum after rejection, failure, stagnation, or burnout. Use whenever the user feels stuck, discouraged, or lost in their PhD — including phrasings like "I don't know why I'm doing this", "my paper got rejected again", "my experiments keep failing", "I feel behind everyone else", "I'm thinking of quitting", "my advisor doesn't believe in me", "I haven't made progress in weeks", or "is a PhD even worth it". Also use proactively when the user seems demoralized mid-conversation. This is not a therapy replacement — it is structured support for navigating the specific emotional and cognitive patterns that make PhD work hard, grounded in the reality of what research actually is.
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jurgendn Skill Flow Learn New TopicOrchestrate breadth-first onboarding into an unfamiliar topic, method, subfield, or research area — going from near-zero to a working, usable map. Use when the user says "I want to learn X", "help me get up to speed on X", "I'm new to X, where do I start", "give me a learning path for X", "I need to understand this field before I can read its papers", or gives a topic they have no grounding in. Routes through singleton skills with graded exercise checkpoints. Also carries a DISCUSSION MODE in which the user learns by explaining to a cast — an honest novice, an opinionated lab mate, and a professor — instead of taking exercise checkpoints; trigger it on "I learn better by discussing", "question me while I explain", "let's discuss this instead of you lecturing me", "set up a study group", or "run this like a lab meeting". Use flow-deep-understanding when the user already knows the basics and wants mastery of ONE specific thing; use flow-idea-to-proof to formalize the user's own research idea.
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jurgendn Bundle Flow Paper LifecycleOrchestrate a research paper end-to-end — from raw idea through literature grounding, experiment design, implementation, results, writing, submission, rebuttal, and artifact release. Use whenever the user wants to drive a whole paper rather than one stage: "help me write this paper from scratch", "where am I in the paper process", "what should I do next on this project", "take this from idea to submission", "I have results, get me to a draft", "manage my paper workflow", or hands over a project and asks for the path to a venue. Also use it for the writing phase itself — "draft the introduction", "outline this paper", "how should I structure this", "turn this spine into a draft", "my first paper" — which it owns as a phase-gated stage-group (stage 10) rather than delegating. This is otherwise a ROUTER that sequences existing singleton skills with stage gates; it does not do the ideation or experiments itself. For a single narrow section, invoke that section's skill directly (e.g. abstract-and-intro-writer, met
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jurgendn Bundle Apply Cold Email DrafterDraft, critique, and revise concise cold emails to professors for PhD applications, research internships, RA opportunities, lab rotations, or prospective-supervisor outreach. Use this skill whenever the user wants to contact a professor, ask about PhD openings, request a meeting, introduce their research background, mention a paper, follow up politely, or convert professor-fit notes into an email. This skill should trigger even if the user says "email a PI", "message a potential advisor", "reach out to faculty", or "cold mail" rather than "cold email".
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jurgendn Bundle Apply Program Fit MapperMap an applicant's research interests to programmes, tracks, faculty, labs, and departments, and check whether their profile actually matches a programme's declared theme, specialisation, or application focus before writing target-specific materials. Covers PhD, research master's, and joint/consortium programmes such as Erasmus Mundus. Use whenever the user asks which professors or programmes fit their interests, how to shortlist targets, how to compare faculty fit, "does my profile match this programme's focus", "is my background relevant to this specialisation/track/theme", "should I even apply to this one", how to turn interests into searchable research themes, or how to prepare target-specific fit notes for SOPs.
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jurgendn Skill Theory Proof SketcherConvert an informal mathematical idea into a precise theorem, lemma, or proof scaffold with explicit assumptions, dependency structure, and clearly marked gaps. Use when developing a new proof, formalizing intuition, planning a theorem structure, or evaluating whether an argument is actually complete.
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jurgendn Bundle Literature TriangulationBuild a source-grounded map of a research topic by comparing papers, benchmarks, code, and genuine disagreements. Use whenever the user wants to understand a research area, not just find papers — including phrasings like "what's the current state of X", "what should I read on Y", "is X still SOTA", "are there good baselines for Z", "what does the field believe about W", "survey this area for me", "what are the key papers on X", "compare these two approaches", or "is this claim actually well-supported". Also use when the user is about to build on a method and should first verify the evidence base is solid. If the user already has a source map and wants polished Related Work prose, use related-work-writer instead. The skill's main job is preventing hallucinated consensus — confidently synthesized positions that aren't grounded in the actual sources.
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jurgendn Skill Flow Deep UnderstandingOrchestrate depth-first mastery of ONE specific object the user already partly knows — a paper, method, algorithm, theorem, derivation, or result — until they can re-derive it, criticize it, and find where it breaks. Use when the user says "I want to really understand X", "help me understand this paper deeply", "I get the gist but not the mechanism", "walk me through this method", "defend/criticize this", or "tear this apart so I get it". Routes through singleton skills and verifies gates with graded exercises. Also supports DISCUSSION MODE, where the user masters the object by explaining it to an honest novice, an opinionated lab mate, and a professor; trigger it on "I learn better by discussing", "question me while I explain", "let's discuss instead of lecturing", "run this like a lab meeting", or "grill me on this paper". Use flow-learn-new-topic for breadth-first onboarding into an area; use flow-idea-to-proof to formalize the user's own idea.
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jurgendn Bundle Banking AI Literature MapperMap publications, prior successful cases, datasets, benchmarks, and method families for banking and fintech AI problems. Use when the user needs publication-grounded evidence for credit risk, fraud, AML, collections, customer intelligence, personalization, banking document AI, compliance, contact-center automation, or financial-services R&D proposals. This skill specializes literature-triangulation for banking domain transfer and should feed publication-grounded-solution-design.
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jurgendn Skill Apply Program Theme ExtractorDetermine what a programme, track, specialisation pathway, doctoral school, or funding call actually selects for — its declared theme, or, where none is published, its operative theme inferred from official evidence. Use whenever the user asks "what is this programme's theme", "what does this call actually want", "is this track themed or open", "the landing page doesn't say what they focus on", "what do these 12 programmes each specialise in", or wants a candidate list of targets characterised before any of them is compared against a profile. Works applicant-free and over many targets at once, producing a reusable theme dossier per target. Distinct from apply-program-fit-mapper, which needs the applicant's evidence and issues the four-way fit verdict — route there once a profile enters. Distinct from apply-research-direction-mapper, which maps one person's research direction rather than an institution's selection scope.
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jurgendn Bundle Paper Argument PlannerPlan the argument of a research paper from an idea, partial draft, experiment results, notes, or reviewer-facing story. Use this skill whenever the user asks how to structure a paper, clarify the contribution, build a paper outline, connect claims to evidence, decide what belongs in each section, turn results into a coherent narrative, or diagnose why a paper feels unfocused. This skill should trigger before drafting full prose when the paper's thesis, claim hierarchy, or section logic is not yet stable.
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jurgendn Skill Theory Formalism TranslatorTranslate an idea across optimization, probability, information theory, dynamical systems, graph theory, and statistics language. Use for interdisciplinary theory work, reframing a problem into a more tractable formalism, connecting literatures, discovering alternative analytical tools, or determining whether different fields express the same structure under different notation.
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jurgendn Bundle Apply Research Direction MapperDefine a professor's recent and trending research direction from publications, lab pages, grants, talks, students, and public materials before writing PhD application fit notes or cold emails. Use this skill whenever the user asks what a professor is working on now, whether a faculty member's research is shifting, how to infer current interests from recent papers, how to prepare for contacting a professor, or how to turn scattered professor evidence into application-ready research-fit angles.
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jurgendn Skill Theory Counterexample HunterSearch for edge cases, pathological constructions, and violated assumptions that break a conjecture or weaken a theorem. Use when a claim feels too broad, an assumption seems suspiciously weak, or a proof step needs stress-testing. Trigger on phrases like "is this always true", "does this hold in general", "check this claim", "try to break this", "stress-test this theorem", "find a counterexample", "is this assumption necessary", or whenever the user states a result and asks whether it can be trusted. Also trigger when reviewing a proof and a step feels hand-wavy or a quantifier feels wrong.
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jurgendn Skill Abstract And Intro WriterDraft or revise the abstract and introduction of a research paper. Use whenever the user needs to write or improve these sections — including phrasings like "write my abstract", "improve my intro", "draft the introduction", "my abstract is weak", "how should I open the paper", "the intro is too long", "I need a hook", "write a one-paragraph summary", or "my introduction doesn't sell the contribution". Also use when the user has a paper plan or results but no prose yet for the opening. The abstract and introduction have distinct structures and reviewer conventions that differ from the rest of the paper; this skill handles both as a pair since the intro must match and extend the abstract's promises. If the contribution or paper spine is not yet stable, use paper-argument-planner first.
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jurgendn Bundle Reviewer Response StrategistPlan rebuttals, reviewer responses, and revision strategies for research papers. Use this skill whenever the user shares peer reviews, reviewer concerns, meta-review text, acceptance/rejection feedback, or asks how to respond to Reviewer 2, what experiments to run for rebuttal, what to concede, how to phrase a response, or how to prioritize limited rebuttal space. This skill focuses on strategy and response structure; use results-writeup for writing new result prose after the strategy is decided.
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jurgendn Bundle Publication Grounded Solution DesignDesign industry R&D solution directions grounded in prior successful cases, academic papers, technical reports, and credible industry publications. Use whenever the user has a vague business, banking, fintech, enterprise, or operational problem and wants to brainstorm methods, draft a theoretically motivated solution, compare solution families, or justify a proposal with publications instead of unsupported intuition. Also use when the user asks for "prior successful cases", "paper-backed solutions", "method draft", "research-backed proposal", or "what has worked before" for an applied industry problem.
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jurgendn Skill Theory Paper To Theorem DistillerDistill a dense theory paper into definitions, main claims, proof strategy, and reusable techniques. Use for theoretical ML or math paper reading, seminar prep, related-work synthesis, extracting reusable lemmas, or deciding what part of a paper is actually load-bearing.
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jurgendn Bundle Apply Recommendation Letter StrategistPlan PhD and research-application recommendation letters: choose recommenders, assess letter strength and risk, draft request or reminder emails, and prepare recommender packets. Use this skill whenever the user asks who should write their letters, whether a recommender is strong enough, how to ask for a recommendation, what materials to send, or how to coordinate letters for PhD programs, fellowships, research internships, RA roles, or lab applications. Establishes the target's declared theme or track from its live official page first, since it decides which recommender's observed evidence matters most and what the packet must supply.
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markoblogo Bundle Compaction SurvivalPreserve working state across long sessions and context compaction by checkpointing decisions, edited files, blockers, open hypotheses, and unresolved errors into compact resumable artifacts. Use on long coding tasks, audits, research, or any session at risk of losing state after compaction.
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markoblogo Bundle Professional Role RouterRoute a substantial current task to the smallest useful set of professional role stances and carry the work through their explicit handoffs. Use for career, research, publishing, coaching, fitness, business, finance, support, engineering, architecture, or other work where specialist methods materially improve the result. Skip simple one-step requests.
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markoblogo Bundle Personal Workspace RouterDesign or maintain a local personal AI workspace that routes requests to isolated domains and professional role profiles. Use when one personal operator spans projects, career, publishing, research, coaching, fitness, finance, and internal development without mixing all context or memory.
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markoblogo Bundle Hypothesis DiversificationGenerate diverse hypotheses, explanations, or solution candidates before evidence review. Use for research, incident analysis, market or product reasoning, adversarial review, and SkillOpt proposal generation when first-answer mode collapse would hide alternatives.
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peterbamuhigire Bundle UX PsychologyUse when a design decision needs a cautious cognitive rationale involving Gestalt grouping, affordances, memory, attention, mental models, or bias. Do not use as proof of user behaviour or for heuristic inspection; route claims to research/testing or heuristic evaluation.
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peterbamuhigire Bundle Demo Driven Design ProcessUse when a design or feature must converge through repeated demo, feedback, dogfooding, selection, and decision capture. Do not use merely to choose one prototype's fidelity; route that artefact decision to wireframing-and-prototyping. through).
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peterbamuhigire Bundle Wireframing And PrototypingUse when a flow or feature needs sketches, wireframes, wireflows, or a clickable/coded prototype and the fidelity must match the learning question. Do not use to run a multi-round convergence process or produce final visual design; route those to demo-driven process or UI craft.
Frequently asked questions
What are Research & Search agent skills?
Research agent skills teach AI agents to gather and synthesize information properly: literature reviews, competitive analysis, web research with citations, and structured summaries. Each SKILL.md encodes a method, not just a prompt, so results stay consistent across runs.
Which Research & Search skills are most installed?
Popular Research & Search skills on SkillMD right now include gre-quant-coach, apply-cv-builder, apply-sop-writer. Rankings shift as installs change; sort this page by "Most installs" for the live list.
Do Research & Search skills work with Claude Code and Cursor?
Yes. Every skill here ships as a SKILL.md file, an open format that works in Claude Code, Claude.ai, Cursor, Codex, Windsurf, and 60+ other agents. Install one with npx skillmds@latest add <owner>/<name>, or copy the file into your agent's skills directory.