Evidence snapshot reviewed Aug 31, 2026GitHub checked Aug 21, 2026
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claude-paper-summary

Create a short, structured overview of a research paper from a local PDF, direct PDF link, or arXiv URL.

At a glance

What it does

Create a short, structured overview of a research paper from a local PDF, direct PDF link, or arXiv URL.

Capabilities
Search, Vision & DataDocumentationSearchData

Before you choose it

This skill parses a paper and creates a roughly 300–500-word quick summary covering the problem, core idea, contributions, quantitative results, significance, and limitations. It is intended for screening papers and gaining a fast conceptual understanding rather than producing study materials or code examples.

Best for

Researchers, students, and technical readers who want to triage papers before deciding whether to study them deeply.

Common tasks

  • Summarize a PDF already stored locally.
  • Turn an arXiv abstract or PDF URL into a concise paper overview.
  • Review a paper's reported benchmark results and stated limitations quickly.

Permissions and data

Processes supplied paper files or URLs and creates local paper-library files.

Permissions
  • Runs shell, file-read, and file-write operations.
  • On first run, runs npm install and attempts a user-level Python package installation.
  • May start a local web UI through a related skill.
Data handling
  • Downloads URL inputs to a temporary directory.
  • Copies the input PDF, extracted text, metadata, summary, and index entries under ~/claude-papers/.
External services
  • Accesses direct PDF and arXiv URLs supplied as input.
Credentials
  • No credentials are declared in the supplied skill document.

Limitations

  • Produces a quick summary only; it does not provide deep study materials, code demonstrations, or interactive visualizations.
  • Paper parsing quality and summary accuracy depend on the source PDF and extracted text.
  • It updates a persistent local index and paper folder rather than operating read-only.

What DSHub checked

  • A complete pinned skill document was captured.
  • The skill explicitly supports local PDF paths, direct PDF URLs, and arXiv URLs.
  • The repository license text is MIT.

What DSHub did not check

  • The skill was not installed or executed by DSHub.
  • Dependency availability, PDF parsing results, and local web UI behavior were not verified.

Pinned install

Primary action

This standalone skill does not have a DSH Plugin install action. Use its source documentation for the delivery method.

Visit the source project

Maintainer source

Skill instructions

View at commit 0af55d0
Maintainer-authored contentCaptured from .agents/skills/claude-paper-summary/SKILL.md on Aug 30, 2026. The text and repository-relative media are fixed to commit 0af55d0daeae with content hash 98bb1131e572; provider-hosted badges may update independently. SKILL.md commands are upstream documentation; use the type-correct primary action above and verify it against this pinned source.

name: claude-paper-summary description: Use this for a quick summary of a research paper's core ideas and key points. Use when you want to quickly understand a paper without deep study materials. Triggers on PDF paths, arXiv URLs, or paper URLs. allowed-tools: Bash, Write, Read

Cross-Agent Compatibility

This file is generated from the existing Claude Paper Skill. Its workflow and output requirements are unchanged; only equivalent host metadata, the plugin-root variable, and cross-skill invocation are adapted.

Resolve CLAUDE_PAPER_PLUGIN_ROOT to the absolute plugin/ directory in this package before each shell invocation. From this SKILL.md, that directory is ../../../plugin. Treat every ${CLAUDE_PAPER_PLUGIN_ROOT} reference below as that resolved absolute directory. Do not substitute the current workspace root.

When this workflow asks to launch the viewer, load and follow the claude-paper-webui skill.


Quick Paper Summary Workflow

This skill generates a concise summary of a research paper's core ideas and key points.

When to use:

  • You want to quickly understand what a paper is about
  • You need the main contributions without deep technical details
  • You're screening papers to decide which to study in depth

When NOT to use:

  • You want comprehensive study materials (use claude-paper-study skill instead)
  • You need code demonstrations
  • You want interactive visualizations

Language Detection: Detect the user's language from their input and generate ALL materials in that language.

  • Example: User says "我们学习一下这篇论文" → Generate materials in Chinese
  • Example: User says "Let's study this paper" → Generate materials in English

Step 0: Check Dependencies (First Run Only)

if [ ! -f "${CLAUDE_PAPER_PLUGIN_ROOT}/.installed" ]; then
  echo "First run - installing dependencies..."
  cd "${CLAUDE_PAPER_PLUGIN_ROOT}"
  npm install || exit 1

  # Install Python dependencies for image extraction
  python3 -m pip install pymupdf --user 2>/dev/null || pip3 install pymupdf --user 2>/dev/null || echo "Warning: Failed to install pymupdf"

  touch "${CLAUDE_PAPER_PLUGIN_ROOT}/.installed"
  echo "Dependencies installed!"
fi

Step 1: Download and Parse PDF

Supports multiple input formats:

  • Local path: ~/Downloads/paper.pdf
  • Direct PDF URL: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1706.03762.pdf
  • arXiv URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762

Step 1a: Check input type and download if URL

USER_INPUT="<user-input>"

# Check if input is a URL (starts with http:// or https://)
if [[ "$USER_INPUT" =~ ^https?:// ]]; then
  # Download PDF from URL
  INPUT_PATH=$(node ${CLAUDE_PAPER_PLUGIN_ROOT}/skills/study/scripts/download-pdf.cjs "$USER_INPUT")
else
  # Use local path directly
  INPUT_PATH="$USER_INPUT"
fi

For URLs, the download script will:

  • Download PDFs to /tmp/claude-paper-downloads/
  • Convert arXiv /abs/ URLs to PDF URLs automatically
  • Validate that URLs point to PDF files
  • Return the local file path for processing

Step 1b: Parse PDF

Extract structured information:

PARSE_OUTPUT_DIR=$(mktemp -d)
node ${CLAUDE_PAPER_PLUGIN_ROOT}/skills/study/scripts/parse-pdf.js \
  "$INPUT_PATH" \
  --output-dir "$PARSE_OUTPUT_DIR"

The command prints a small, strict JSON summary to stdout and writes:

  • meta.json — title, authors, abstract, links, page count, and a context-safe content preview
  • paper.txt — complete extracted text without the 50k preview limit

Use paper.txt as the source for the quick summary. Do not treat meta.json.content as the complete paper when contentTruncated is true.


Step 2: Generate Quick Summary

Create the paper folder:

mkdir -p ~/claude-papers/papers/{paper-slug}
cp "<metaPath-from-parser-output>" ~/claude-papers/papers/{paper-slug}/meta.json
cp "<fullTextPath-from-parser-output>" ~/claude-papers/papers/{paper-slug}/paper.txt
cp "$INPUT_PATH" ~/claude-papers/papers/{paper-slug}/paper.pdf

Generate quick-summary.md with the following structure:

# Quick Summary: [Paper Title]

## One Sentence
[One sentence that captures what the paper is about]

## Problem
[What problem does this paper solve? Why is it important?]

## Core Idea
[The key innovation explained in 2-3 sentences. What makes this paper novel?]

## Key Contributions
- [Contribution 1]
- [Contribution 2]
- [Contribution 3]
- [Contribution 4 if applicable]

## Main Results
| Metric | Value | Dataset/Benchmark |
|--------|-------|-------------------|
| [metric1] | [value] | [dataset] |
| [metric2] | [value] | [dataset] |

## Why It Matters
[Practical implications. How does this advance the field? What can we now do that we couldn't before?]

## Limitations
- [Limitation 1]
- [Limitation 2]

Guidelines for each section:

Section Length Focus
One Sentence 1 sentence High-level summary
Problem 2-3 sentences Context and motivation
Core Idea 2-3 sentences The main innovation
Key Contributions 3-5 bullets What's new/novel
Main Results 1 table Quantitative metrics from the paper
Why It Matters 2-3 sentences Practical value
Limitations 2-3 bullets What the paper doesn't solve

Total length: ~300-500 words (excluding results table)


Step 3: Update Index

CRITICAL: Read existing index.json first, then append the new paper. Never overwrite the entire file.

If index.json does not exist, create:

{"papers": []}

Append new entry to the papers array:

{
  "id": "paper-slug",
  "title": "Paper Title",
  "slug": "paper-slug",
  "authors": ["Author 1", "Author 2"],
  "abstract": "Paper abstract...",
  "year": 2024,
  "date": "2024-01-01",
  "tags": ["quick-summary"],
  "githubLinks": ["https://github.com/..."],
  "codeLinks": ["https://..."]
}

IMPORTANT: The index.json file must be located at:

~/claude-papers/index.json

Step 4: Relaunch Web UI

Load and follow the claude-paper-webui skill.


Step 5: Present Summary to User

After generating the summary:

  1. Show the user the quick-summary.md content - Display the full summary

  2. Offer next steps:

    • "Would you like to study this paper in more depth? Use claude-paper-study skill for comprehensive materials."
    • "Do you have questions about specific parts of the paper?"
    • "Would you like me to explain any section in more detail?"
  3. File location reminder:

    • Summary saved to: ~/claude-papers/papers/{paper-slug}/quick-summary.md
    • Web UI available at: http://localhost:5815

Example Output

# Quick Summary: Attention Is All You Need

## One Sentence
This paper introduces the Transformer, a neural network architecture based entirely on attention mechanisms, achieving state-of-the-art results in machine translation.

## Problem
Sequence transduction models at the time (RNNs, LSTMs, GRUs) process data sequentially, limiting parallelization and struggling with long-range dependencies.

## Core Idea
Replace recurrent layers with self-attention mechanisms, enabling full parallelization during training and direct modeling of dependencies regardless of distance. The Transformer uses multi-head attention to jointly attend to information from different representation subspaces.

## Key Contributions
- First transduction model relying entirely on self-attention, no recurrence
- Multi-head attention mechanism for joint attention across subspaces
- Positional encodings to inject sequence order information
- Achieved 28.4 BLEU on WMT 2014 English-to-German (2+ BLEU improvement)
- Training was significantly faster than previous state-of-the-art

## Main Results
| Metric | Value | Dataset/Benchmark |
|--------|-------|-------------------|
| BLEU (EN-DE) | 28.4 | WMT 2014 |
| BLEU (EN-FR) | 41.8 | WMT 2014 |
| Training cost | 3.3 × 10^18 FLOPs | WMT 2014 EN-DE |
| Training time | 12 hours on 8 P100 | WMT 2014 EN-DE |

## Why It Matters
The Transformer eliminated recurrence, enabling massive parallelization and scaling. This architecture became the foundation for BERT, GPT, and virtually all modern large language models, fundamentally changing NLP and beyond.

## Limitations
- Self-attention has O(n²) complexity, limiting sequence length
- No explicit modeling of position beyond learned encodings
- Requires large amounts of training data

Notes

  • This skill is intentionally minimal - it generates only the summary, no code demos, no interactive HTML, no deep-dive materials
  • For users who want more, they can use claude-paper-study skill to generate comprehensive materials
  • The summary should be self-contained and readable in under 5 minutes
  • Focus on conceptual clarity over technical details

Operate deliberately

Install and manage

Prerequisites and target Profile

Target Researchers Profile, Students Profile, Technical Readers Profile

Delivery Skill Files — https://raw.githubusercontent.com/alaliqing/claude-paper/0af55d0daeae8e86571700fd1839feb6be9440a6/.agents/skills/claude-paper-summary/SKILL.md

Compatibility and access

Not declared in supplied evidence Not declared in supplied evidence

Review compatibility evidence

Risk facts

Dependency Installation

On first run, the workflow runs npm install and attempts to install the PyMuPDF Python package.

Evidence
Network And Local Files

The workflow can download paper URLs and saves PDFs, extracted text, summaries, and an index under ~/claude-papers/.

Evidence
Evidence and editorial reviewManifest, Bundle patch, distribution and freshness

Immutable evidence

Review status and source activity

Human approved

Approved for publication after reviewing the source-linked content and immutable release record. AI assisted with the draft; the publication decision was human.

Human reviewed Aug 31, 2026, 1:27 PM UTCGitHub facts last checked Aug 31, 2026, 1:12 PM UTC

No material source change has been recorded since this evidence baseline.

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