varde80 Obsidian Paper Summary Skill
Create structured paper summaries in your Obsidian vault.
Prerequisites
Configuration file at config/config.json with Obsidian settings:
obsidian.vault_path: Path to your Obsidian vaultobsidian.papers_folder: Subfolder for paper notes (default: "Papers")
Usage
Create a paper summary:
cd /Users/varde/code/arxiv-zotero-obsidian && python3 .claude/skills/obsidian-summarize/scripts/create_summary.py \
--arxiv-id "2401.12345" \
--title "Paper Title" \
--authors "Author One,Author Two" \
--abstract "Paper abstract..." \
--summary "Your summary of the paper..."
Available Options
| Option | Description | Required |
|---|---|---|
--arxiv-id |
arXiv paper ID | Yes |
--title |
Paper title | Yes |
--authors |
Comma-separated author names | Yes |
--abstract |
Original abstract | No |
--published |
Publication date | No |
--zotero-key |
Zotero item key for linking | No |
--summary |
Your summary | No |
--key-findings |
Pipe-separated findings | No |
--methodology |
Methodology notes | No |
--contributions |
Main contributions | No |
--limitations |
Paper limitations | No |
--future-work |
Future directions | No |
--personal-notes |
Your thoughts | No |
--tags |
Comma-separated tags | No |
Examples
# Basic summary
python3 .claude/skills/obsidian-summarize/scripts/create_summary.py \
--arxiv-id "1706.03762" \
--title "Attention Is All You Need" \
--authors "Ashish Vaswani,Noam Shazeer" \
--abstract "The dominant sequence transduction models..." \
--summary "Introduces the Transformer architecture..."
# Full summary with all fields
python3 .claude/skills/obsidian-summarize/scripts/create_summary.py \
--arxiv-id "1706.03762" \
--title "Attention Is All You Need" \
--authors "Ashish Vaswani,Noam Shazeer" \
--abstract "The dominant sequence transduction models..." \
--published "2017-06-12" \
--zotero-key "ABC123XYZ" \
--summary "Introduces the Transformer architecture..." \
--key-findings "Self-attention replaces recurrence|Achieves SOTA on translation|Parallelizable training" \
--methodology "Encoder-decoder with multi-head attention" \
--tags "transformer,attention,nlp"
Note Structure
The created note includes:
- Frontmatter: YAML metadata (title, authors, dates, links)
- Overview: Quick reference callout box
- Abstract: Original paper abstract
- Summary: Your summary
- Key Findings: Bullet points
- Methodology: Method description
- Contributions: Main contributions
- Limitations & Future Work: Critical analysis
- Personal Notes: Your thoughts
- Related Papers: Space for linking other notes
Output
Creates markdown file at: {vault_path}/{papers_folder}/{YYYY-MM-DD}-{title-slug}.md
Integration Workflow
Typical workflow with other skills:
- arxiv-search: Find papers on a topic
- zotero-add: Add selected papers to Zotero (get item_key)
- obsidian-summarize: Create summary note with Zotero link
# After adding to Zotero with item_key ABC123
python3 .claude/skills/obsidian-summarize/scripts/create_summary.py \
--arxiv-id "2401.12345" \
--title "Paper Title" \
--authors "Author" \
--zotero-key "ABC123" \
--summary "Claude-generated summary here..."