Academic Literature Mining

Academic Literature Mining

Build a reproducible scholarly corpus from persistent identifiers and authoritative metadata. Preserve the original PDF, complete citation record, provenance, quality decision, and page-level multimodal vectors so later writing can cite the source safely.

Enforce the invariants

• Use the Rust litmine CLI for the complete runtime. Keep PDF preparation in

Rust and PDFium; do not add OCR or an external PDF-to-text service.

• Enforce a strict read-only boundary for

~/Project/visual-encoding-vs-raw-iot-reasoning: never create, edit, delete, rename, or move any file there. Read only research/academic-literature-mining-skill-issues.md and the exact files that report explicitly names; do not list, search, or inspect any other path in that project. Apply fixes only in the repository containing this SKILL.md.

• Keep discovery workers untrusted and cheap. Let them search only, and require the

coordinator to resolve identifiers, verify metadata, score quality, authorize downloads, and write to Qdrant.

• Accept a candidate only when it has a DOI, arXiv ID, or OpenAlex ID that can be

resolved through a scholarly metadata source.

• Prefer the formally published, peer-reviewed version over a preprint. Before

accepting or citing any preprint, search by exact title and authors for a journal article and, in fields with archival conferences, a proceedings version; verify the match through an authoritative publisher, journal, or proceedings record and verify its DOI when one is assigned.

• When a formal version exists, cite and canonicalize that version. Retain the

preprint only as alternate-identifier, full-text, and version provenance. Use a standalone preprint only when it is indispensable and no formal version can be verified; label it explicitly, record the sources and date checked, and never use it as the sole support for a key conclusion.

• Download only an openly licensed or otherwise authorized full-text URL. Never

infer download permission from the ability to access a URL.

• Preserve the original PDF. For each page, extract only its embedded native text

layer with PDFium and render the complete page to an image. Embed and rerank both as one text_image page; when no usable native text exists, fall back to the complete page image. Do not OCR or split a page into semantic text chunks.

• Do not send an application/pdf payload to the NVIDIA Embed or Rerank endpoint;

those model APIs accept text and image data URLs, not raw PDF files.

• Use exactly:

nvidia/llama-nemotron-embed-vl-1b-v2 for embeddings and nvidia/llama-nemotron-rerank-vl-1b-v2 for reranking.

• Store the canonical citation object, source records, identifiers, license,

provenance, quality signals, PDF checksum, and page coordinates alongside every indexed point.

• Route every live corpus lookup through

[references/query-routing.md](references/query-routing.md). Use Qdrant plus Nemotron reranking for semantic evidence and SQLite-backed CLI commands for metadata, provenance, state, and audits. Never search exported or preserved JSON files as a substitute.

• Treat retrieval output as evidence candidates. Re-open the original PDF before

quoting or making a claim in a manuscript.

Install the skill

Read [INSTALL.MD](INSTALL.MD) before running the workflow. Follow its portable subagent-manifest procedure instead of assuming a particular agent framework.

Copy .env.example to .env, then set NVIDIA_API_KEY, QDRANT_API_KEY, OPENALEX_API_KEY, and CONTACT_EMAIL as applicable. Do not place secrets in a subagent manifest or inherit the coordinator environment into search workers.

Initialize the runtime:

cp .env.example .env
# Edit .env before continuing.
rustup update stable
cargo build --release --locked
docker compose up -d
cargo run --release --locked -- doctor

Define the research run

Copy assets/research-plan.example.json and edit it for the research question. Specify:

• the exact question and search concepts;
• inclusion and exclusion criteria;
• publication window and accepted work types;
• publication-status policy, with preprints excluded by default unless the plan

explicitly permits indispensable, clearly labeled exceptions;

• minimum quality score and corpus size;
• a min_relevance_score of 0.0 for rank-only triage unless a nonzero cutoff

has been calibrated on labeled examples for this exact screening query;

• source-specific queries rather than one broad query;
• stopping rules so repeated runs are bounded and reproducible.

Read [references/quality-policy.md](references/quality-policy.md) before changing thresholds. A citation count alone is never sufficient evidence of academic value.

Delegate discovery to budget search workers

Read [references/subagent-contract.md](references/subagent-contract.md). Give the installing agent assets/subagent-manifest.example.json, assets/subagent-task.schema.json, assets/subagent-result.schema.json, and assets/search-subagent-prompt.md.

Translate the portable manifest into the host agent runtime's native manifest. Do not invent a native filename or schema. Keep the following boundary:

1. The coordinator shards source/query/page tasks.
2. Budget workers search scholarly systems and return strict NDJSON candidates.
3. Workers never download PDFs, call NVIDIA, access Qdrant, run a shell, or receive

secrets.

1. The coordinator imports results and independently resolves every persistent ID.

Import worker output:

cargo run --release --locked -- \
  import-agent-results corpus/inbox/candidates.ndjson

Reject malformed output rather than repairing unsupported claims manually.

Run the mining workflow

Run all built-in discovery and corpus stages:

cargo run --release --locked -- \
  mine --plan assets/research-plan.example.json

For controlled runs, execute the stages independently:

cargo run --release --locked -- discover --plan research-plan.json
cargo run --release --locked -- refresh-metadata
cargo run --release --locked -- screen --plan research-plan.json
cargo run --release --locked -- download
cargo run --release --locked -- render
cargo run --release --locked -- ingest
cargo run --release --locked -- audit
cargo run --release --locked -- export

After upgrading an existing workspace that may contain DOI-backed arXiv preprints, run refresh-metadata and then rerun screen with the preserved research plan. Let refresh-metadata re-resolve affected DOI records through Crossref, promote verified journal or archival-conference citation fields, and queue promoted records for screening. screen performs this refresh automatically as well. Keep the arXiv identifier and authorized PDF as alternate-version provenance.

After upgrading an existing image-only corpus, rebuild its stored pages once and re-ingest them:

cargo run --release --locked -- render --refresh-existing
cargo run --release --locked -- ingest

Inspect status and the audit output after every large run. Do not treat a network retry, a missing abstract, or an inaccessible PDF as a successful source.

Query the live corpus

Read [references/query-routing.md](references/query-routing.md) before querying a corpus or drafting from it. Classify the lookup before selecting a tool:

• use query for semantic passage, claim, method, result, table, figure,

limitation, or counterevidence retrieval;

• use catalog for structured SQLite filters and corpus listings;
• use inspect-work for one known work_id, canonical metadata, provenance, PDF

identity, and page locators;

• use status and audit for live corpus state and integrity.

Do not inspect exports/*.json*, metadata/**/*.json, raw provider JSON, state.sqlite3, extracted page text, or rendered-page directories to discover evidence. Do not fall back to those files when a live query fails.

Search the multimodal page corpus:

cargo run --release --locked -- \
  query "state one atomic evidence question precisely" \
  --top-k 20 --candidate-limit 80

Query relational metadata:

cargo run --release --locked -- \
  catalog --workspace corpus --status indexed --limit 50
cargo run --release --locked -- \
  inspect-work 'doi:10.1234/example' --workspace corpus

The CLI embeds the text query, retrieves candidate PDF pages from Qdrant, then reranks each page using the same native-text-plus-image representation used for indexing. Image-only pages remain supported. Use the returned work ID, page number, DOI, and canonical citation to inspect and cite the original source. Join a relevant vector result to SQLite with inspect-work, then open the exact preserved PDF page. Treat vector and rerank scores only as ordering signals.

Export citations and audit provenance

Read [references/citation-schema.md](references/citation-schema.md) before integrating exports into a writing system.

Export:

• CSL JSON for citation managers and structured writing tools;
• BibTeX for LaTeX workflows;
• RIS for broad reference-manager interoperability;
• canonical JSONL for lossless corpus exchange;
• an audit report covering metadata, provenance, PDF checksums, and indexing state.

Run audit immediately before manuscript work. Never create a citation from an embedded page alone when the canonical record is incomplete. Read exported files only for explicit citation-manager handoff, requested exchange formats, or audit review; never use them for corpus discovery or semantic evidence retrieval.

Consult API contracts

Read [references/api-contracts.md](references/api-contracts.md) before changing NVIDIA, Qdrant, Crossref, OpenAlex, arXiv, or Semantic Scholar integrations. Keep raw provider records in SQLite so later metadata corrections remain traceable.

Source & license

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

• Author: Ruisi-Lu
• Source: Ruisi-Lu/academic-literature-mining-skill
• License: Apache-2.0

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