New: 98,000+ skills indexed from GitHub repos with 100+ stars · every skill safety-checkedBrowse top skillsTop skills
Esc to closeBrowse all skills
Submit a skillBrowse skills
Submit a skillBrowse skills

Agent skill

Firecrawl Research Index

by firecrawl in firecrawl/skills

Find the papers that answer a research query in Firecrawl's research paper index — a corpus of paper abstracts whose largest share is biomedical and life-science literature (PubMed, bioRxiv…

ISCAuto-check passedResearch & Science

Install Firecrawl Research Index

skills CLI
$ npx skills add firecrawl/skills --skill firecrawl-research-index -a claude-code

Project install by default; add -g for ~/.claude/skills/.

GitHub CLI
$ gh skill install firecrawl/skills firecrawl-research-index --agent claude-code

Project scope by default; add --scope user for a personal install. Needs GitHub CLI 2.90.0 or later (public preview).

Manual copy
$ git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/firecrawl/skills.git skills-src && mkdir -p .claude/skills && cp -r skills-src/skills/core/firecrawl-research-index .claude/skills/firecrawl-research-index && rm -rf skills-src

Use ~/.claude/skills/ instead of .claude/skills for a personal install. The folder must contain SKILL.md.

Claude Code skills documentation · loads skills from .claude/skills/

Facts

Skill name
firecrawl-research-index
GitHub stars
117
Token cost
~2.4k tokens
SKILL.md length
1,225 words
Files
1
Skills in repo
29
Repo updated
First seen
Licence
ISC

At a glance

Find the papers that answer a research query in Firecrawl's research paper index — a corpus of paper abstracts whose largest share is biomedical and life-science literature (PubMed, bioRxiv…

  • Literature-finding and paper-retrieval tasks of any kind
  • SKILL.md covers What is in the index, The tools, and what each is…, Match the approach to the query and Principles, plus 1 more section
  • Instructions only: no scripts, shell commands, URLs or credentials in SKILL.md
  • Including clinical

What it does

Firecrawl Research Index is an agent skill from firecrawl/skills. Find the papers that answer a research query in Firecrawl's research paper index — a corpus of paper abstracts whose largest share is biomedical and life-science literature (PubMed, bioRxiv, medRxiv), alongside arXiv preprints in CS, physics, and math — using semantic search, semantic and structural expansion, and in-body verification. Use this skill for literature-finding and paper-retrieval tasks of any kind, including clinical, biomedical, drug, gene, disease, and other life-science questions, whether the…

Its SKILL.md is about 2.4k tokens, which your agent loads only when the skill is triggered. It is a single SKILL.md file with no bundled scripts.

It sits in Research & Science, covering Academic paper search and Web scraping. It works with Firecrawl, arXiv, PubMed and Model Context Protocol. The repository describes itself as: Firecrawl agent skills for Claude Code, Codex and Cursor: web search, scraping, crawling and browser interaction. Firecrawl is the most complete web data API for AI agents. The licence is ISC.

When your agent uses it

  • Literature-finding and paper-retrieval tasks of any kind
  • Including clinical
  • Other life-science questions
  • Whether the answer is a single paper

Example prompts

  • “research”
  • “/firecrawl-research-index”

What it can do on your machine

Read from SKILL.md and the folder at commit 5348e9e. It shows what the files ask for, not the result of running them.

  • Tool permissions

    Pre-approves nothing: there is no allowed-tools line, so your agent's usual permission prompts apply.

    From allowed-tools in the SKILL.md frontmatter.

  • Runs code

    No scripts in the folder and no shell commands in SKILL.md.

    From the folder's file list and the shell code blocks in SKILL.md.

  • Network

    No URLs in SKILL.md.

    From URLs in SKILL.md, links to its own repository left out.

  • Credentials

    Names no API keys, tokens, secrets or passwords.

    From names ending in _API_KEY, _TOKEN, _SECRET, _KEY or _PASSWORD in SKILL.md.

Context cost

Firecrawl Research Index loads about 2.4k tokens when it runs. Until then it costs about 258 tokens; SKILL.md has 1,225 words of instructions outside code blocks.

Always · name and description, kept in context so the agent knows when to use it
~258
When it runs · the whole SKILL.md, loaded when a task matches
~2.4k

Estimates: characters ÷ 4, the usual rule of thumb; real counts depend on the model's tokenizer. Scripts and assets cost tokens only if the agent reads them.

Safety

Auto-check passed

The automated check found no risky patterns in SKILL.md.

Automated static check — not a guarantee. Review scripts before installing. It scans the text of SKILL.md for risky patterns (piping downloads into a shell, reading credential files, hidden Unicode, destructive commands); files beside SKILL.md are not scanned.

SKILL.md

The full file from firecrawl/skills at commit 5348e9e, republished under its ISC licence (© firecrawl). 1,225 words, ~2,442 tokens.

Download SKILL.mdSave it as .claude/skills/firecrawl-research-index/SKILL.md (or your agent's skills folder).
name
firecrawl-research-index
description
Find the papers that answer a research query in Firecrawl's research paper index — a corpus of paper abstracts whose largest share is biomedical and life-science literature (PubMed, bioRxiv, medRxiv), alongside arXiv preprints in CS, physics, and math — using semantic search, semantic and structural expansion, and in-body verification. Use this skill for literature-finding and paper-retrieval tasks of any kind, including clinical, biomedical, drug, gene, disease, and other life-science questions, whether the answer is a single paper or a full multi-paper set. The index is reached only through the `firecrawl_research_*` MCP tools or the `firecrawl research` CLI subcommands. Calling `firecrawl_search` with its `categories` option set to `["research"]` is a different feature — it filters ordinary web search to research-affiliated websites (the list includes PubMed, bioRxiv, medRxiv, arXiv, and publisher sites) and returns page results from them, without querying the paper records in this index.

Firecrawl Research Index

Find the research papers that answer a research query. Some questions have a single answer; many have several — and when in doubt, lean toward returning the fuller relevant set (most relevant first) rather than narrowing to one. A reader is better served seeing the neighboring methods and papers than having them silently dropped.

What is in the index

Paper abstracts, with full text reachable per paper. The largest share of the corpus is biomedical and life-science literature — PubMed journal articles plus bioRxiv and medRxiv preprints — so clinical, drug, gene, disease, epidemiology, and public-health questions are in scope. arXiv preprints cover computer science, physics, and mathematics. Coverage outside those sources is thinner: a paper that exists only behind a publisher paywall or in a niche venue may not be indexed, and the general web tools below are the fallback when it isn't.

There is no fixed recipe. Read the query, decide what kind it is, and choose the approach below. Some queries need a single search; others need heavy structural/semantic expansion. Don't run machinery a query doesn't call for.

The tools, and what each is uniquely good at

  • MCP: firecrawl_research_search_papers(query, k?) CLI: firecrawl research search-papers <query> [--k <number>] Semantic (HyDE) search over abstracts. The natural first move for almost any query. If results look thin or all-alike, re-run with a different framing (sibling domain, rival method, dataset/benchmark name) rather than giving up.

  • MCP: firecrawl_research_related_papers(seed_ids, intent, mode?, k?) CLI: firecrawl research related-papers <seedIds...> --intent <intent> [--mode <similar|citers|references>] [--k <number>] Semantic and structural expansion, ranked to your intent. This reaches papers semantic search cannot, and it's how you turn one good hit into the rest of a set. mode=similar → niche siblings; citers → who uses/builds on the seeds; references → what they build on / compare against.

  • MCP: firecrawl_research_inspect_paper(id) CLI: firecrawl research inspect-paper <id> Canonical metadata for one paper: title, abstract, authors, categories, source ids, and dates. Use it after search_papers or related_papers when you need the complete citation/metadata for a candidate, or when you have an id from elsewhere and need to confirm what paper it resolves to. This does not read the paper body; use read_paper for specific full-text questions.

  • MCP: firecrawl_research_read_paper(id, question) CLI: firecrawl research read-paper <id> --question <question> In-body passages of one paper, to verify a load-bearing constraint (a method actually used, a score actually reported, an affiliation, what a paper compares to). Use it to settle a specific doubt, not on everything.

  • MCP: firecrawl_search(query, categories: ["research"]) CLI: firecrawl search <query> --categories research Not this index. This is a website filter: it restricts a normal web search to a short list of research-affiliated domains — the list does include pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov, biorxiv.org, medrxiv.org, and arxiv.org alongside publisher sites — and returns page results in a research group beside web, each with url, title, description (the matched passage), position, and category: "research" — web results carry no category, so that is the field to key on when merging. So it reaches those sites' web pages; what it does not do is query their paper records in this index — no semantic search over abstracts, no citation-graph or related-paper expansion, no canonical paper metadata, and no in-body passages. The results are ordinary web results. Use it when you are already running a web search and want those sites weighed in the same call. For anything that is actually a paper-finding task, use firecrawl_research_search_papers and its siblings above.

  • MCP: firecrawl_search(query) / firecrawl_scrape(url) CLI: firecrawl search <query> / firecrawl scrape <url> General web search and page fetch, for facts that don't live in paper abstracts: benchmark leaderboards, rankings, "who scores best / is largest / is most used." Find the ranking on the web, then map the top entries back to papers with search_papers. Reach for these only when the corpus can't answer the question on its own.

Show full SKILL.md (599 more words)Show less

Match the approach to the query

  • Single named paper ("the Qwen3 report") → one search_papers, done. This is the only case that truly wants exactly one paper.
  • Paper by description / by method or technique ("the paper that introduced X", "training-free N-gram detection of AI text") → find the best match, then assume there's a family: expand with related_papers and include the closely-related methods/papers too. Even when one paper is the exact literal match, surface and keep its neighbors — don't narrow to the single best hit and reason the rest out. Only treat it as one-answer if the query names a specific paper.
  • Enumeration / method-family ("papers that do X", "alternatives to Adam", "benchmarks for Y") → the answer is a set, and this is where related_papers earns its keep: expand several strong anchors with mode=similar, re-seed from new strong hits. One search is never enough here.
  • Exhibiting ("papers that use / exhibit property P") → the relevant papers apply P but their abstracts may not describe it. Go from P's defining paper outward via citers/references, and use read_paper to confirm a candidate actually uses P.
  • Superlative / leaderboard ("best on benchmark X", "largest", "most popular") → the ranking lives on leaderboards / the web, not in any single abstract. Use firecrawl_search / firecrawl_scrape to find the benchmark's leaderboard or rankings, read off the top models/papers, then search_papers each to get its paper. As a fallback, search the benchmark and read_paper candidates for reported numbers. The hardest kind — cast wide.
  • Org / author filtered ("from <org>", "by <author>") → topical match isn't enough; verify the affiliation/authorship (metadata or read_paper) before keeping a paper.
  • Compare-against ("what does paper X benchmark against / build on") → the answer is inside paper X: read_paper(X, ...) or related_papers([X], ..., mode="references").

Principles

  • Two different features share the word "research." The paper index is firecrawl_research_* / firecrawl research. The categories: ["research"] option on firecrawl_search is a website filter — it does point web search at PubMed, bioRxiv, medRxiv, arXiv, and publisher sites, but what comes back is their web pages, not paper records. If a task is about finding papers, the tools in this skill are the ones that read the corpus; reaching for categories: ["research"] will quietly answer a different question.
  • Query shape and subject field are separate. A clinical-trial question and a machine-learning question take the same shapes above; what differs is only which source the hits come from. Don't send a biomedical or life-science query to the open web on the assumption the corpus is arXiv-only — PubMed, bioRxiv, and medRxiv are the largest part of what search_papers reads.
  • When in doubt, include. For any topic / method / comparison question, return the relevant family, not just the single best match — err toward keeping a plausibly-relevant paper rather than dropping it. The neighboring methods are part of a good answer; don't reason close work out just because one paper is the most exact match.
  • Follow the literature, and keep what you find. The seminal source, the competing methods, the close neighbors are usually a hop away — use related_papers, and include them, not just the first hit. Stopping at one good result is the most common way to leave the reader with half an answer.
  • Verify to exclude, not to gatekeep. Use read_paper to rule a paper out when a hard constraint clearly fails (wrong org/author, doesn't actually report the score). When a paper is plausibly relevant, lean toward keeping it rather than demanding proof.
  • Only drop the clearly off-topic. Don't pad with papers you're confident are unrelated — but that's a high bar; most plausibly-relevant work should make the cut.

See also

© firecrawl, ISC. Rendered from Markdown: HTML in the file is shown as text, images as links, and headings moved down two levels. Raw file

Files

Just SKILL.md in skills/core/firecrawl-research-index of firecrawl/skills.

Open the folder on GitHubat commit 5348e9e

Compare with similar skills

Firecrawl Research Index next to the 5 skills that share the most tags, products or categories with it. Stars are the repository's; “used in” counts other GitHub owners with a copy.

Firecrawl Research Index compared with similar skills
SkillStarsUsed inTokensAuto-checkLicenceRepo updated
Firecrawl Research Index this skillfirecrawl/skills117—~2.4kAutomated safety check: PassISC
Paper Searchopenags/paper-search-mcp2.8k—~1.2kAutomated safety check: NotesMIT
Nature Academic Searchwp-a/nature-academic-search304—~1.4kAutomated safety check: PassMIT
Paper Searchopenags/paper-search-mcp2.8k—~794Automated safety check: NotesMIT
Rival Search MCPdamionrashford/RivalSearchMCP132—~796Automated safety check: PassMIT
Academic Search and Citation RouterYuan1z0825/nature-skills47k—~884Automated safety check: PassApache-2.0

Similar skills

  • Paper Search

    openags/paper-search-mcp

    Search, download, and read academic papers from 20+ sources (arXiv, PubMed, Semantic Scholar, CrossRef, etc).

    2.8k GitHub stars~1.2k tokensUpdated 8 days ago
    Research & ScienceAuto-check: notes

  • Nature Academic Search

    wp-a/nature-academic-search

    A skill your agent uses when users ask to 找文献、做文献检索、查论文、查临床试验、核验引用、去重文献、设计 PubMed/MeSH 检索式、追踪上下游引文、解析 DOI/PMID/PMCID/arXiv/OpenAlex/Semantic Scholar/NCT ID， 或导出 RIS、BibTeX、NBIB、ENW；also use for…

    304 GitHub stars~1.4k tokensUpdated 8 days ago
    Research & ScienceAuto-check passed

  • Paper Search

    openags/paper-search-mcp

    Search, download, and read academic papers through the paper-search MCP tools (mcppaper-search), covering arXiv, PubMed, bioRxiv, Semantic Scholar, Crossref, OpenAlex and 15+ other sources.

    2.8k GitHub stars~794 tokensUpdated 8 days ago
    Research & ScienceAuto-check: notes

  • Rival Search MCP

    damionrashford/RivalSearchMCP

    Deterministic deep research via RivalSearchMCP. An agent skill from damionrashford/RivalSearchMCP.

    132 GitHub stars~796 tokensUpdated today
    Research & ScienceAuto-check passed

  • Academic Search and Citation Router

    Yuan1z0825/nature-skills

    Finds papers across literature sources, verifies and converts citations, builds MeSH strategies and audits independent citations of a paper.

    47k GitHub stars~884 tokensUpdated today
    Research & ScienceAuto-check passed

  • Nature Academic Search

    jing1312/nature-figure-skill

    Multi-source literature search, citation verification, MeSH search strategy, citation file management (.nbib/.ris/.bib conversion), and reference management (BibTeX, related articles, ID conversion)…

    171 GitHub stars~1.3k tokensUpdated 1 mo ago
    Research & ScienceAuto-check: notes

More from firecrawl/skills

All 29 skills in this repo

  • Firecrawl Scrape

    firecrawl/skills

    Read a known webpage or execute a discovered workflow or data-provider capability.

    117 GitHub stars~1.8k tokensUpdated yesterday
    Auto-check passed

  • Firecrawl Agent

    firecrawl/skills

    Autonomously navigate websites and extract structured data across pages.

    117 GitHub stars~1.2k tokensUpdated yesterday
    Auto-check passed

  • Firecrawl Company Directories

    firecrawl/skills

    Extract structured company lists from directories with Firecrawl.

    117 GitHub stars~557 tokensUpdated yesterday
    Auto-check passed

  • Firecrawl Competitive Intel

    firecrawl/skills

    Monitor competitor pricing, features, changelogs, dashboards, and product changes with Firecrawl.

    117 GitHub stars~604 tokensUpdated yesterday
    Auto-check passed

  • Firecrawl Crawl

    firecrawl/skills

    Bulk-extract many pages from one site or section. An agent skill from firecrawl/skills.

    117 GitHub stars~467 tokensUpdated yesterday
    Auto-check passed

  • Firecrawl Dashboard Reporting

    firecrawl/skills

    Pull metrics from analytics dashboards and internal web tools with Firecrawl browser.

    117 GitHub stars~590 tokensUpdated yesterday
    Auto-check passed

Works with

Categories

Questions about Firecrawl Research Index

What does Firecrawl Research Index do?

Find the papers that answer a research query in Firecrawl's research paper index — a corpus of paper abstracts whose largest share is biomedical and life-science literature (PubMed, bioRxiv…. Firecrawl Research Index is an agent skill from firecrawl/skills. Find the papers that answer a research query in Firecrawl's research paper index — a corpus of paper abstracts whose largest share is biomedical and life-science literature (PubMed, bioRxiv, medRxiv), alongside arXiv preprints in CS, physics, and math — using semantic search, semantic and structural expansion, and in-body verification.

When should I use Firecrawl Research Index?

Firecrawl Research Index fits situations like: literature-finding and paper-retrieval tasks of any kind; including clinical; other life-science questions; whether the answer is a single paper.

How do I install Firecrawl Research Index in Claude Code?

Run `npx skills add firecrawl/skills --skill firecrawl-research-index -a claude-code`. Or copy the skill folder (skills/core/firecrawl-research-index in firecrawl/skills) into .claude/skills/firecrawl-research-index in your project. Claude Code loads it when a task matches its description.

How do I install Firecrawl Research Index in Codex?

Run `npx skills add firecrawl/skills --skill firecrawl-research-index -a codex`. Or copy the skill folder (skills/core/firecrawl-research-index in firecrawl/skills) into .agents/skills/firecrawl-research-index in your project. Codex loads it when a task matches its description.

Can I use Firecrawl Research Index in Cursor, Gemini CLI or GitHub Copilot?

Cursor, Gemini CLI, GitHub Copilot and OpenCode also load SKILL.md folders. With the skills CLI, run `npx skills add firecrawl/skills --skill firecrawl-research-index -a cursor` (or -a gemini-cli, github-copilot or opencode for the others). To copy it by hand, put the folder in .cursor/skills/firecrawl-research-index, .gemini/skills/firecrawl-research-index, .github/skills/firecrawl-research-index and .opencode/skills/firecrawl-research-index in your project.

What does Firecrawl Research Index need to run?

SKILL.md names no scripts, command-line tools or credentials: Firecrawl Research Index is instructions for the agent only.

Does Firecrawl Research Index access the network?

SKILL.md contains no URLs. Any network use would come from the scripts or tools the agent runs. This is read from the text; nothing was executed.

Is Firecrawl Research Index safe to install?

Our automated static check of SKILL.md found no risky patterns, such as piping downloads into a shell, reading credential files or hidden Unicode. It is not a guarantee. Review the folder before installing.

What licence does Firecrawl Research Index use?

Firecrawl Research Index is published under the ISC licence (the repository's licence). It allows redistribution, so the full SKILL.md is shown on this page.

How many tokens does Firecrawl Research Index use?

About 2.4k tokens (SKILL.md is roughly 9.8k characters). Agents keep only the skill's name and description in context until a task matches; then they load SKILL.md in full.

What are the alternatives to Firecrawl Research Index?

Skills that share tags, products or a category with Firecrawl Research Index: Paper Search (openags/paper-search-mcp, 2.8k stars), Nature Academic Search (wp-a/nature-academic-search, 304 stars), Paper Search (openags/paper-search-mcp, 2.8k stars) and Rival Search MCP (damionrashford/RivalSearchMCP, 132 stars). The comparison table on this page puts their stars, adoption, token cost, safety result and licence side by side.

Who maintains Firecrawl Research Index?

firecrawl (a GitHub organization) maintains it in firecrawl/skills, which has 117 GitHub stars. The repository holds 29 skills in this directory. The repository was last updated on October 8, 2026.

Source: firecrawl/skills on GitHub. Facts on this page come from the repository at the commit we read; the author's words are quoted as theirs.