Best Claude Skills for Research
Research repositories help Claude ingest large or messy source material — papers, books, transcripts, whole websites — and hand back structured summaries, notebooks, or trained skills. Several close the loop by turning what was learned into an asset you can reuse, from a NotebookLM knowledge base to a measurably optimized skill.
They serve analysts, students, and builders who spend more time reading than writing and want that reading compounded into something durable. Pick these when the goal is genuinely understanding a body of material rather than shipping the next feature.
Starter picks
Three vetted repositories to install first if you're new to Research.
SkillOpt
A Microsoft research tool that automatically optimizes agent skills through a training loop — rollout, reflect, aggregate, select, update, evaluate — with built-in benchmarks.
book-to-skill
A skill (and companion CLI) that converts a book or long document into a reusable agent skill, distilling its methods into something Claude can apply.
qiaomu-anything-to-notebooklm
A skill that converts assorted sources — articles, documents, media — into clean material ready to load into Google NotebookLM as a knowledge base.
All Research repositories
3 repositories, most starred first.
SkillOpt
A Microsoft research tool that automatically optimizes agent skills through a training loop — rollout, reflect, aggregate, select, update, evaluate — with built-in benchmarks.
book-to-skill
A skill (and companion CLI) that converts a book or long document into a reusable agent skill, distilling its methods into something Claude can apply.
qiaomu-anything-to-notebooklm
A skill that converts assorted sources — articles, documents, media — into clean material ready to load into Google NotebookLM as a knowledge base.
From the blog
The State of Claude Skills: Spring 2026
An in-depth look at how the open-source community is building around Claude, the rise of MCP servers, and what to expect next.
12 New Claude Skill Repositories to Watch
This week's roundup of the most promising new Claude skills, including a powerful terminal agent and new MCP servers for database management.
Communities
Get help, share your work, and keep up with the Claude ecosystem.
- Claude Developers Discord · Discord
- r/ClaudeAI · Reddit
- Anthropic Cookbooks · GitHub Org
Know a great Research skill? Add it to the directory.
Submit a Repository