Academic Writing Skills for Research Papers
Academic writing is a genre with its own rules, and the skills in this topic cover the parts of it a reviewer will check: a claim they can underline, a literature section that shows you know the conversation you are joining, a method detailed enough to reproduce, results separated from interpretation, a discussion that states what the results do and do not mean, and the style and citation conventions of your venue. Use the ranked list by picking the sub-topic you are weakest on right now rather than the one that sounds most impressive. Read the skill's description to confirm it matches your stage of drafting, then load one skill at a time and apply it to a real section of your manuscript.
5 to start with17 top options
Start with these.
Academic writing is a genre: situate the claim, show the method, report results, discuss limits, cite everything a peer would need.
These are the closest matches for this work. Start with the first one and open it to install.
- Rank 01View Agent SkillDirect
nature-writing
Drafts or restructures scientific manuscript sections and first-submission materials from author-provided evidence, with paper-type, section, and journal-specific rules.
13,796 · popularity - Rank 02View Agent SkillDirect
academic-paper
Runs a multi-agent academic paper pipeline with modes for planning, outlining, drafting, revision, abstracts, literature review, citation checks, and rebuttal audits across paper types and citation formats.
10,067 · popularity - Rank 03View Agent SkillDirect
nature-polishing
Polishes, translates, or tightens existing academic prose by paper type, section, language, and journal, preserving facts, terminology, and evidence boundaries.
15,558 · popularity - Rank 04View Agent SkillDirect
nature-citation
Segments manuscript claims, searches and conservatively grades Nature/CNS-family supporting literature, validates author metadata, and exports a reference-manager file.
13,940 · popularity - Rank 05View Agent SkillDirect
nature-academic-search
Searches literature across sources, verifies and manages citations, builds MeSH/PubMed strategies, and runs citation-impact audits with reference-file conversion.
13,446 · popularity
Explore 12 more Agent Skills
- Rank 09View Agent SkillPossible
firecrawl-research-papers
Builds a sourced literature review by searching Firecrawl's paper index (PubMed, bioRxiv, medRxiv, arXiv), expanding from seed papers, and verifying claims in-body.
33,101 · popularity - Rank 10View Agent SkillPossible
academic-paper-reviewer
Simulates a five-seat peer review panel with field-specific reviewers and a Devil's Advocate, producing review reports, an editorial decision, and a revision roadmap.
9,151 · popularity - Rank 11View Agent SkillPossible
firecrawl-research-index
Finds papers in Firecrawl's research index via semantic search, related-paper expansion, and in-body verification, returning the relevant paper set with metadata.
22,612 · popularity - Rank 12View Agent SkillPossible
nature-reader
Creates source-grounded Chinese-English paper readers with aligned text, figures, tables, and equations, plus source-linked answers to questions about a paper.
13,142 · popularity - Rank 13View Agent SkillPossible
nature-paper-card
Turns one scientific paper into a structured deep-reading card analyzing methods, experiment-to-claim evidence, limitations, and research ideas.
8,798 · popularity - Rank 14View Agent SkillPossible
bmad-deep-recon
Frames and runs decision-grade research — drafting research prompts, processing finished reports into cited summaries, or running parallel web searches across built-in research types including academic literature.
7,000 · popularity - Rank 15View Agent SkillPossible
nature-literature-pipeline
Runs a cron-driven literature pipeline that searches multiple sources, scores candidates on six dimensions, fine-reads the top papers, delivers a digest, and archives notes.
10,260 · popularity - Rank 16View Agent SkillPossible
nature-downloader
Routes lawful academic full-text retrieval through open-access sources, publisher APIs, CNKI institutional access, and browser-based institutional providers with manifests.
Needs (stated): Credentials · Python · Node.js
10,335 · popularity - Rank 17View Agent SkillPossible
ljg-paper
Explains a research paper to a non-specialist reader — what it studies, the authors' contribution, how findings follow, and what the evidence does not establish — saving an Org note.
6,802 · popularity - Rank 18View Agent SkillPossible
doc-coauthoring
OfficialGuide users through a structured workflow for co-authoring documentation. Use when user wants to write documentation, proposals, technical specs, decision docs, or similar structured content. This workflow helps users efficiently transfer context, refine content through iteration, and verify the doc works for readers. Trigger when user mentions writing docs, creating proposals, drafting specs, or similar documentation tasks.
- Rank 19View Agent SkillPossible
writing-guidelines
OfficialReview docs/prose for Writing Guidelines compliance. Use when asked to "review my docs", "check writing style", "audit prose", "review docs voice and tone", or "check this page against the writing handbook".
- Rank 20View Agent SkillPossible
docx
OfficialUse this skill whenever the user wants to create, read, edit, or manipulate Word documents (.docx files) or Word templates (.dotx files). Triggers include: any mention of 'Word doc', 'word document', '.docx', '.dotx', or requests to produce professional documents with formatting like tables of contents, headings, page numbers, or letterheads. Also use when extracting or reorganizing content from .docx or .dotx files, inserting or replacing images in documents, performing find-and-replace in Word files, working with tracked changes or comments, or converting content into a polished Word document. If the user asks for a 'report', 'memo', 'letter', 'template', or similar deliverable as a Word or .docx file, use this skill. Do NOT use for PDFs, spreadsheets, Google Docs, or general coding tasks unrelated to document generation.
What this topic covers
Each sub-topic groups Agent Skills for a specific situation.
- Claim
- The sentence a reviewer should be able to underline.
- Literature
- Show you know the conversation you are joining.
- Method
- Enough detail that someone could try to reproduce you.
- Results
- What happened, separated from what you wish it meant.
- Discussion
- What the results mean, and what they do not.
- Style & citation
- The house rules of the venue you are writing for.
Frequently asked questions
- How is this list ordered?
- It is ranked by observed search demand, with direct matches to the topic placed first and a cap on how many skills any single publisher can occupy.
- Which sub-topic should I start with?
- Start with the section you are currently drafting or the one a reviewer has already flagged. The sub-topics run from claim and literature through method, results, discussion, and style and citation, so they map onto the order most papers are written and revised.
- Can a skill handle citation formatting for my venue?
- Style and citation skills exist for exactly that, since every venue has its own house rules. They are most useful once your argument is settled, because reformatting a draft you are still restructuring wastes the pass.
- Do these skills write the paper for me?
- No. They work on the genre conventions of academic writing: situating a claim, showing method, reporting results, discussing limits, and citing what a peer would need. You still supply the research and the judgment about what it means.
How to install an Agent Skill
Start with the first skill on this page. Claude Code reads a SKILL.md once it is in the skills directory:
- Claude Code — copy the SKILL.md for nature-writing into ~/.claude/skills/nature-writing/ for yourself, or .claude/skills/nature-writing/ to share it with a project.
- From the registry — run npx skills add yuan1z0825/nature-skills@nature-writing.
- Or download nature-writing from its source and place that SKILL.md in the directory above.
How to choose Check the source and the skill’s own instructions before you install. Official and Notable describe where a skill comes from.