AI Research Skills

The catalog, installation, and visual layer for a Vertical AI Research Reference Harness. Move from research orientation to release through 17 portable skills, an eight-stage lifecycle, evidence-aware handoffs, and explicit human gates.

Built for graduate students, PhDs, postdocs, research support staff, and agent/harness builders who need inspectable research workflows rather than a black box. The portable skills live in this repository; research-hub supplies the executable runtime, while the optional agent-collab-harness adds policy/checkpoint governance.

Languages: English | 繁中 · Pipeline · Examples · Runtime contract · Glossary · For Agent/Harness Builders

📚 Part of the agentic AI learning roadmap — featured in §13–14 (research workflows).

Start here — Why, what, and how

See the whole research lifecycle first

The 17-skill core is organized around durable handoffs: each stage produces the next stage's input, while cross-cutting tools preserve context, verification, and delegation boundaries.

Try the smallest useful path

claude plugin marketplace add WenyuChiou/ai-research-skills
claude plugin install research-workspace@ai-research-skills

Then ask, for example:

Build a literature triage matrix for human-in-the-loop research agents. Verify identifiers, preserve contradictions, and show me the evidence gaps before recommending next steps.

Need an executable, resumable workflow instead of prompt-only skills? Continue with pip install research-hub-pipeline, then run research-hub setup and research-hub doctor. The full path is in Install.

Understand the two control layers

Harness architecture — deterministic control around semantic work

research-hub owns the research-domain runtime and recoverable state. Role agents do semantic work; deterministic validators, evidence contracts, and the optional agent-collab-harness policy/checkpoint layer control what may proceed.

Human-in-the-loop — where automation must pause

Read-only and reversible steps can continue automatically. Breaking contracts, skill removal, external writes, semantic acceptance, and release authorization remain explicit human decisions.

Contents

1. Install — get the skills
2. Why this catalog exists
3. The pipeline — what each stage delivers to the next
4. Use it
5. See what each skill produces
6. FAQ
7. Compatibility
8. Limitations

1. Install — get the skills

The core asset is portable SKILL.md; Claude Code marketplace support is the convenience layer. Use the path that matches your host:

Full per-host recipes are in docs/install.md → Using these skills outside Claude Code.

Claude Code fastest path — 30 seconds:

claude plugin marketplace add WenyuChiou/ai-research-skills
claude plugin install research-workspace@ai-research-skills

Windows cmd.exe: run the commands one at a time. If the plugin list does not show research-workspace@ai-research-skills, your paste probably only executed the first line; see docs/install.md for the single-line CMD form.

For Claude Code, the first two commands install the 12-skill research-workspace plugin. Add the optional plugins only when you need manuscript writing, full Zotero operations, or Claude-to-Codex/Antigravity delegation.

Additive install — stop after any step and use what you have:

# 1. Marketplace + 12 research-hub skills
claude plugin marketplace add WenyuChiou/ai-research-skills
claude plugin install research-workspace@ai-research-skills

# 2. Manuscript work — outline, drafting, prose and evidence audit, scientific review (14/17)
claude plugin install academic-writing-skills@ai-research-skills

# 3. Zotero CRUD (15/17; enable local API in Zotero desktop first — docs/setup-guide.md §C)
claude plugin install zotero-skills@ai-research-skills

# 4. Multi-CLI delegation (17/17; install codex / agy CLI binaries first)
claude plugin install codex-delegate@ai-research-skills
claude plugin install antigravity-delegate@ai-research-skills

# 5. Literature pipeline automation (Python CLI behind research-hub skills)
pip install research-hub-pipeline
research-hub setup --persona researcher
research-hub doctor

Separate live smoke (not installation):

This is a live literature workflow, not an offline install check. --no-nlm disables NotebookLM only; it does not disable other network calls, models, or writes. Complete the live-run preflight and obtain the applicable data/cost/write authorization before running:

research-hub auto "agent-based modeling" --max-papers 3 --no-nlm

Batch all 5 plugins in one go:

bash scripts/install-all.sh        # macOS / Linux / git-bash
pwsh scripts/install-all.ps1       # Windows PowerShell

Verify:

claude plugin list
# fastest path: research-workspace@ai-research-skills is ✔ enabled.
# full install: 5 plugins ending in @ai-research-skills are ✔ enabled.

claude plugin list verifies only the Claude Code marketplace install. It does not tell you whether Codex, Cursor, OpenClaw, Hermes, or a generic API client has loaded the SKILL.md files. Marketplace-installed plugins live under ~/.claude/plugins/cache/..., not ~/.claude/skills/.

Per-plugin details: docs/install.md. Python / Zotero / Git not set up yet? Start with docs/setup-guide.md. Need to know whether a skill is prompt-only or needs the Python runtime? See docs/runtime-contract.md.

git clone https://github.com/WenyuChiou/ai-research-skills.git
cd ai-research-skills

This catalog is the registry, not a monorepo. Each plugin's source code lives in its own repo:

• github.com/WenyuChiou/research-hub — 12 research-workspace skills
• github.com/WenyuChiou/academic-writing-skills — 2 skills
• github.com/WenyuChiou/zotero-skills — 1 skill
• github.com/WenyuChiou/codex-delegate — 1 skill
• github.com/WenyuChiou/antigravity-delegate — 1 skill

If you're hacking on a plugin, clone its source repo, not this catalog. This catalog only maintains marketplace.json, docs, image assets, and the catalog-side CHANGELOG.md.

2. Why this catalog exists

You probably know the AI-for-research pain points already. The five below are the ones this catalo