Research Paper Compare

Compare research papers by retrieving full PDFs from titles, URLs, or files and synthesizing differences, strengths, weaknesses, and evidence-backed trade-offs.

Security Scan

The skill's requests and runtime instructions are consistent with its stated purpose (retrieving and comparing full-paper PDFs), but it omits operational details (PDF extraction tooling, network/sandbox constraints) that you should verify before installing.

Purpose & Capability

The name and description (compare research papers by obtaining full PDFs and synthesizing differences) match the instructions: the SKILL.md explicitly describes resolving titles/URLs/local PDFs, downloading PDF full text, normalizing records, and performing structured comparison. No unrelated credentials, binaries, or installs are requested, so required capabilities are proportionate to the stated purpose.

Instruction Scope

The SKILL.md requires web search and downloading arbitrary PDF URLs to obtain full text (expected for this purpose). It correctly enforces a policy to stop if full PDF text is unobtainable. However, it does not specify operational guardrails: it doesn't state whether PDF parsing is local vs sent to third-party services, whether downloads are sandboxed, or how to handle paywalled content or copyright-restricted PDFs. It also assumes the runtime can extract readable text from PDFs but does not declare the needed extraction tooling.

Install Mechanism

Instruction-only skill with no install spec and no code files—this is low-risk from an installation perspective (nothing will be written to disk or downloaded as part of a packaged install).

Credentials

The skill declares no environment variables or credentials (proportional). That said, in practice retrieving PDFs from publisher sites may require credentials or access tokens; the skill does not request these and states it will stop if full text isn't accessible. Verify whether your platform's agent will attempt to use any agent-level credentials for retrieval or will upload PDFs to external extraction services—those behaviors are not described by the skill.

Persistence & Privilege

always is false and the skill does not request persistent presence or elevated privileges. It does not attempt to modify other skills or system-wide settings based on the provided files.

Assessment

This skill appears coherent with its purpose, but check a few operational points before installing: 1) Confirm the agent environment has a safe, local PDF extraction capability (or understand which external service would be used) because the skill assumes full-text extraction but declares no tooling. 2) Verify network policies and sandboxing—the skill will download PDFs from arbitrary URLs and may attempt to fetch from publisher sites; ensure downloads are allowed and handled safely. 3) If you expect paywalled PDFs, decide whether you'll provide credentials; the skill does not request them and will stop if full text is unavailable. 4) Confirm the agent will not upload PDF contents to third-party services unless you approve that data flow. If these operational details are acceptable, the skill is internally consistent with its description.

When to Use

User wants to compare multiple papers and may provide paper titles, links, or PDF files. Use this skill when the goal is to identify differences, strengths, weaknesses, assumptions, and trade-offs across papers.

Quick Reference

Topic	File
Input handling	input-handling.md
Comparison schema	comparison-schema.md
Output formats	output-patterns.md
Evidence rules	references/evidence-policy.md

Core Rules

1. Retrieve and read PDF full text for every paper before doing substantive comparison. Do not rely on abstract-only evidence.
2. Normalize all inputs into comparable paper records before comparing them.
3. Compare papers on shared dimensions only, and avoid direct metric comparison when evaluation settings differ.
4. Mark evidence quality and uncertainty explicitly for each paper and each major claim.
5. Produce a table-first comparison, then add concise analytical synthesis.
6. If a full PDF cannot be obtained for one or more papers, stop the comparison and report which papers are blocked.