Claude skills for automated literature surveys: verified corpora, honest metrics, minimal figures, and a short PDF report that tells you who did it best and where the field is heading.

Ptolemy's Almagest, transmitted through Arabic as al majisti, "the greatest", was the definitive synthesis of the astronomical state of the art for over a millennium. That is the bar a survey should aim for: not a pile of citations, but the compendium a field measures itself against.

How a survey runs

flowchart LR
    A[Scope] --> B[Recon]
    B --> C{Coordinator}
    C --> D[Survey agents]
    D --> C
    C --> E[Overseer audit]
    E --> C
    C --> F[Verified corpus]
    F --> G[Figures]
    F --> H[Hypotheses]
    G --> I[5 page PDF]
    H --> I

Install

In Claude Code:

/plugin marketplace add DanieleMosh/almagest-survey
/plugin install almagest-survey@almagest-survey

Or clone and symlink the skill directly:

git clone https://github.com/DanieleMosh/almagest-survey.git
ln -s "$(pwd)/almagest-survey/skills/literature-survey" ~/.claude/skills/literature-survey

Then start a survey with /literature-survey <your topic>, or just ask Claude to survey the state of the art on something.

Skills

Skill What it does
literature-survey Runs a state of the art survey on any STEM topic: parallel research agents with an overseer, a DOI verified corpus, open access PDF acquisition, Tufte style seaborn figures, extracted hypotheses, and a compiled LaTeX report of about 5 pages.

What a run leaves behind

<topic>-survey/
  report.pdf             the deliverable, about 5 pages
  data/scope.md          the agreed scope, settled with you before any harvesting
  data/papers.csv        the corpus, single source of truth for every count in the report
  data/refs_verified.csv Crossref and arXiv resolution result for every reference
  papers/                retrieved open access PDFs, plus MANIFEST.md for the rest
  figures/               regenerated from papers.csv, so prose and plots cannot drift

Every DOI is resolved against Crossref before it reaches the report, unverifiable fields stay blank rather than being guessed, and papers behind a paywall are listed with links instead of being scraped.

License

MIT