# Lit Review Agent Tools

> 🤖 The strongest curated list of open-source AI-agent tools for literature review — 70+ tools across 11 categories (Claude Code skills, deep research, MCP servers, PDF parsing, systematic review). 面向智能体文献综述的最强工具大全。

- **Type:** MCP server
- **Install:** `agentstack add mcp-brycewang-stanford-lit-review-agent-tools`
- **Verified:** Yes — security-reviewed for prompt injection and unsafe behavior
- **Seller:** [brycewang-stanford](https://agentstack.voostack.com/s/brycewang-stanford)
- **Installs:** 0
- **Category:** [AI & ML](https://agentstack.voostack.com/c/ai-and-ml)
- **Latest version:** 0.1.0
- **License:** CC0-1.0
- **Upstream author:** [brycewang-stanford](https://github.com/brycewang-stanford)
- **Source:** https://github.com/brycewang-stanford/lit-review-agent-tools
- **Website:** https://brycewang-stanford.github.io/lit-review-agent-tools/

## Install

```sh
agentstack add mcp-brycewang-stanford-lit-review-agent-tools
```

Requires the [AgentStack CLI](https://agentstack.voostack.com/docs/cli). Works with Claude Code, Cursor, and any MCP-compatible agent.

## About

# Awesome AI Literature Review [](https://awesome.re)

> Open-source AI agents, skills, MCP servers, and frameworks for literature review.

Curated tools that help AI agents handle the whole loop of a literature review: search, screen, extract, read, synthesize, verify citations, and write.

Every entry carries a maintenance status and a licence, refreshed weekly from the GitHub API, because a dead link and a non-commercial licence both cost you more than a missing star count. Four of the workflows here were run end to end rather than described.

- 🔍 [Searchable version](https://brycewang-stanford.github.io/lit-review-agent-tools/) — filter by workflow stage, maintenance status and licence
- 🧪 [Verified workflows](recipes/) — executed, with real output and what broke
- 🧭 [Browse by workflow stage](STAGES.md) — search · screen · extract · read · synthesize · cite-check · write · review
- 🎯 [The ten picks, and when not to use them](PICKS.md)
- 📊 [Health report](HEALTH.md) · [dataset](data/tools.json) · [changelog](CHANGELOG.md)
- 🇨🇳 [简体中文版](README.zh.md) — 完整中文表格版

## Contents

- [All-in-one Research Agents and Skills](#all-in-one-research-agents-and-skills)
- [Deep Research and Auto Survey Generation](#deep-research-and-auto-survey-generation)
- [Autonomous Science](#autonomous-science)
- [Paper Q and A and RAG](#paper-q-and-a-and-rag)
- [Systematic Review and Screening](#systematic-review-and-screening)
- [MCP Servers](#mcp-servers)
- [Reference and Knowledge Management](#reference-and-knowledge-management)
- [PDF to Structured Data](#pdf-to-structured-data)
- [Citation Graphs and API Clients](#citation-graphs-and-api-clients)
- [Writing and Peer Review](#writing-and-peer-review)
- [Awesome Lists](#awesome-lists)

## All-in-one Research Agents and Skills

- [academic-research-skills](https://github.com/Imbad0202/academic-research-skills) - Claude Code skills running a ten-stage research-to-paper pipeline with citation integrity gates.
- [academic-research-skills-codex](https://github.com/Imbad0202/academic-research-skills-codex) - Codex-native sibling with a human-in-the-loop research flow.
- [Research-Paper-Writing-Skills](https://github.com/Master-cai/Research-Paper-Writing-Skills) - Machine-learning paper-writing skill pack for Codex, Claude Code, and Gemini.
- [claude-skills](https://github.com/alirezarezvani/claude-skills) - Large skill collection including a literature-review, grants, and deep-research stack.
- [academic-paper-skills](https://github.com/lishix520/academic-paper-skills) - Planning and writing skills with quality checkpoints for systematic paper writing.
- [dr-claw](https://github.com/OpenLAIR/dr-claw) - Research workbench with multiple AI-assistant personas.
- [ScienceClaw](https://github.com/beita6969/ScienceClaw) - Self-evolving AI research colleague with a large skill library.
- [qinyan-academic-skills](https://github.com/LeonChaoX/qinyan-academic-skills) - Multilingual library of installable AI-agent skills across disciplines.
- [agent-research-skills](https://github.com/lingzhi227/agent-research-skills) - Claude Code skills for systematic literature review with citation-validation scripts.
- [medsci-skills](https://github.com/Aperivue/medsci-skills) - Medical-research skills for search, reporting-guideline checks, statistics, and submission.

## Deep Research and Auto Survey Generation

- [STORM](https://github.com/stanford-oval/storm) - Retrieval-grounded system that writes cited, encyclopedia-style long articles from a topic.
- [gpt-researcher](https://github.com/assafelovic/gpt-researcher) - Autonomous agent that runs deep research on any topic and outputs a cited report.
- [deep-research](https://github.com/dzhng/deep-research) - Minimal iterative deep-research agent that is small and easy to hack on.
- [open_deep_research](https://github.com/langchain-ai/open_deep_research) - Open deep-research reference implementation from LangChain.
- [local-deep-research](https://github.com/LearningCircuit/local-deep-research) - Local and private deep-research over many sources including arXiv and PubMed.
- [open-deep-research](https://github.com/nickscamara/open-deep-research) - Open deep-research clone that reasons over web data via Firecrawl.
- [SurveyX](https://github.com/IAAR-Shanghai/SurveyX) - Automated generation of academic survey papers from a topic.
- [LitLLM](https://github.com/LitLLM/LitLLM) - Toolkit that drafts related-work sections fast with retrieval and prompting.
- [opendraft](https://github.com/federicodeponte/opendraft) - Free and open-source AI paper writer where many agents collaborate on long drafts.
- [AutoSurveyGPT](https://github.com/a554b554/AutoSurveyGPT) - Finds and ranks scholarly papers and auto-generates a survey.

## Autonomous Science

- [AI-Scientist](https://github.com/SakanaAI/AI-Scientist) - End-to-end automated discovery covering literature review, experiments, writing, and review.
- [AI-Scientist-v2](https://github.com/SakanaAI/AI-Scientist-v2) - Workshop-level automated scientific discovery via agentic tree search.
- [AutoResearchClaw](https://github.com/aiming-lab/AutoResearchClaw) - Self-evolving research from idea to conference-ready paper with real literature and sandboxed experiments.
- [Agent-Laboratory](https://github.com/SamuelSchmidgall/AgentLaboratory) - Autonomous workflow from literature review through experimentation to report writing.
- [SciAgentsDiscovery](https://github.com/lamm-mit/SciAgentsDiscovery) - Multi-agent system that generates hypotheses and scientific discoveries.
- [Zochi](https://github.com/IntologyAI/Zochi) - Artificial-scientist system doing end-to-end discovery toward publication.
- [DeepInnovator](https://github.com/HKUDS/DeepInnovator) - Autonomously generates research ideas, hypotheses, and experiment designs.

## Paper Q and A and RAG

- [paper-qa](https://github.com/Future-House/paper-qa) - High-accuracy retrieval system for scientific papers whose answers always cite sources.
- [paperai](https://github.com/neuml/paperai) - Semantic search and question answering over medical and scientific papers.
- [openpaper](https://github.com/khoj-ai/openpaper) - Research-library workbench with a grounded, citation-aware review assistant.

## Systematic Review and Screening

- [ASReview](https://github.com/asreview/asreview) - Active-learning screener that ranks papers to cut systematic-review screening time.
- [LatteReview](https://github.com/PouriaRouzrokh/LatteReview) - Low-code package that automates systematic-review screening with AI agents.
- [prismAId](https://github.com/Open-and-Sustainable/prismAId) - Protocol-based, no-code toolkit for replicable review screening and extraction.
- [prisma-review-tool](https://github.com/Black-Lights/prisma-review-tool) - Structured review flow with AI-assisted screening over open scholarly sources.

## MCP Servers

- [zotero-mcp](https://github.com/54yyyu/zotero-mcp) - Connects a Zotero library to AI clients for semantic search and citation analysis.
- [arxiv-mcp-server](https://github.com/blazickjp/arxiv-mcp-server) - Searches and analyzes arXiv papers and converts them to Markdown for context.
- [paper-search-mcp](https://github.com/openags/paper-search-mcp) - Multi-source search and download across many scholarly databases.
- [PubMed-MCP-Server](https://github.com/JackKuo666/PubMed-MCP-Server) - Searches, accesses, and analyzes PubMed articles through a tool interface.
- [alex-mcp](https://github.com/drAbreu/alex-mcp) - OpenAlex server focused on author disambiguation and institution lookup.
- [openalex-research-mcp](https://github.com/oksure/openalex-research-mcp) - OpenAlex-backed citation analysis, trend tracking, and collaboration mapping.

## Reference and Knowledge Management

- [zotero-gpt](https://github.com/MuiseDestiny/zotero-gpt) - Integrates a chat assistant into Zotero to talk with your library.
- [papersgpt-for-zotero](https://github.com/papersgpt/papersgpt-for-zotero) - Zotero plugin to chat with and batch-process PDFs across many models.
- [ai-research-assistant](https://github.com/lifan0127/ai-research-assistant) - Assistant that lives inside Zotero for research tasks.
- [paper-note-filler](https://github.com/chauff/paper-note-filler) - Obsidian plugin that auto-creates notes from scholarly sources.

## PDF to Structured Data

- [MinerU](https://github.com/opendatalab/MinerU) - High-accuracy conversion of PDFs and office files to LLM-ready Markdown and JSON.
- [docling](https://github.com/docling-project/docling) - Document parser that prepares PDFs and documents for generative AI and RAG.
- [marker](https://github.com/datalab-to/marker) - Fast conversion of PDFs and documents to clean Markdown and JSON.
- [PDFMathTranslate](https://github.com/PDFMathTranslate/PDFMathTranslate) - Layout-preserving scientific-PDF translation that keeps formulas and figures intact.
- [grobid](https://github.com/grobidOrg/grobid) - Extracts structured metadata, references, and sections from scholarly PDFs.
- [paperetl](https://github.com/neuml/paperetl) - ETL pipeline that loads medical and scientific papers into structured stores.
- [scipdf_parser](https://github.com/titipata/scipdf_parser) - Python parser for scientific PDFs that extracts content and figures.

## Citation Graphs and API Clients

- [scholarly](https://github.com/scholarly-python-package/scholarly) - Pythonic retrieval of authors and publications from Google Scholar.
- [semanticscholar](https://github.com/danielnsilva/semanticscholar) - Python client for the Semantic Scholar APIs.
- [pyalex](https://github.com/J535D165/pyalex) - Lightweight Python interface to the OpenAlex API.
- [ArxivDigest](https://github.com/AutoLLM/ArxivDigest) - Personalized daily arXiv digest with relevancy scoring and email delivery.
- [citegraph](https://github.com/Citegraph/citegraph) - Open web visualizer of papers and citation networks.

## Writing and Peer Review

- [lmms-lab-writer](https://github.com/EvolvingLMMs-Lab/lmms-lab-writer) - Local-first agentic LaTeX writer for AI-assisted academic writing.
- [academic-writing-agents](https://github.com/andrehuang/academic-writing-agents) - Claude Code plugin with specialist agents for reviewing, drafting, and polishing.
- [ai-peer-review](https://github.com/poldrack/ai-peer-review) - Multi-model meta-review that synthesizes independent reviews of a paper.
- [openreviewer](https://github.com/maxidl/openreviewer) - Generates peer reviews of conference papers for pre-submission feedback.
- [academic-research-plugin](https://github.com/JeanDiable/academic-research-plugin) - Claude Code plugin for surveys, paper reviews, and finding research gaps.

## Awesome Lists

- [Awesome-LLM-Scientific-Discovery](https://github.com/HKUST-KnowComp/Awesome-LLM-Scientific-Discovery) - Survey list of language models in scientific discovery.
- [Awesome-Auto-Research-Tools](https://github.com/handsome-rich/Awesome-Auto-Research-Tools) - Automated tools for search, reading, experiments, and code generation.
- [awesome-ai-auto-research](https://github.com/worldbench/awesome-ai-auto-research) - Survey of AI approaches to automated research.
- [LLM4SR](https://github.com/du-nlp-lab/LLM4SR) - Papers and resources on language models for scientific research surveys.
- [awesome-ai-research-tools](https://github.com/0x11c11e/awesome-ai-research-tools) - AI tools for literature reviews, reference management, and data analysis.
- [awesome-evidence-synthesis](https://github.com/evidencesynthesis-tools/awesome-evidence-synthesis) - Open-source tools for systematic reviews and meta-analysis.

## Contributing

Contributions welcome. Read the [contributing guidelines](contributing.md) first.

## Source & license

This open-source MCP server is cataloged on AgentStack and links to its original source — we do not rehost the code.

- **Author:** [brycewang-stanford](https://github.com/brycewang-stanford)
- **Source:** [brycewang-stanford/lit-review-agent-tools](https://github.com/brycewang-stanford/lit-review-agent-tools)
- **License:** CC0-1.0
- **Homepage:** https://brycewang-stanford.github.io/lit-review-agent-tools/

Install and usage instructions live in the source repository linked above.

## Pricing

- **Free** — Free

## Security capabilities

Automated source analysis of v0.1.0 — what this tool can access:

- **Network access:** no
- **Filesystem access:** no
- **Shell / process execution:** no
- **Environment & secrets:** no
- **Dynamic code execution:** no

*"Yes" means the capability is present in the source — more access means more to trust, not that it is unsafe.*


## Versions

- **0.1.0** — security scan: passed — Imported from the upstream source.

## Links

- Listing page: https://agentstack.voostack.com/l/mcp-brycewang-stanford-lit-review-agent-tools
- Seller: https://agentstack.voostack.com/s/brycewang-stanford
- Browse the marketplace: https://agentstack.voostack.com/browse

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Listed on AgentStack — the marketplace for AI agent skills and MCP servers. Every listing is security-reviewed. Creators keep 70%.