Literature Search Biorxiv

From Google DeepMind's science toolkit, this searches bioRxiv and medRxiv preprint archives by date range rather than keywords. You specify a time window and filter by criteria, which makes sense when you need systematic coverage of recent work rather than relevance-ranked results. The skill explicitly reminds you to check paper licenses since preprints have varying terms. It's passed two security audits but has a warning from Snyk. Worth noting this requires uv to be installed first. If you're doing literature reviews in biology or medicine and need chronological completeness over search ranking, this handles the API calls and license tracking for you.

skills.sh installs: 2.6K
GitHub stars: 3.4K
last updated: Aug 21, 2026

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Install

$ npx -y skills add google-deepmind/science-skills --skill literature-search-biorxiv --agent claude-code

Installs into .claude/skills of the current project.

Files

bioRxiv and medRxiv Literature Search

Prerequisites

uv: Read the uv skill and follow its Setup instructions to ensure uv is installed and on PATH.
User Notification: If .licenses/literature_search_biorxiv_LICENSE.txt does not already exist in the workspace root directory then (1) prominently notify the user to check the terms at https://api.biorxiv.org/ and https://www.biorxiv.org/content/about-biorxiv and to always check the license of the papers retrieved by the skill for any restrictions, then (2) create the file recording the notification text and timestamp.

Search Strategy Guide (Read First)

This skill browses a date-based preprint archive. It is NOT a keyword search engine. Choose your approach based on what you already know:

A DOI (e.g., from a citation): Use search_by_doi.py. Fast and reliable.
Approximate date + category: Use search_by_dates.py with a 1–4 week range and --category.
Only a topic or keywords, no date: Do NOT use this skill for discovery. Use a keyword-capable literature skill first to find relevant DOIs, then return here to fetch metadata.