Paper-to-Agent Guide

Paper-to-Agent Guide

A skill for transforming published research papers into interactive AI agents that can answer questions, explain methodology, and help replicate findings. Based on Paper2Agent (2K stars), this skill guides the agent through extracting structured knowledge from academic papers and creating conversational interfaces for deep exploration.

Overview

Traditional paper reading is linear and passive. Paper-to-Agent converts this into an active, queryable experience. By parsing a paper's structure, extracting key claims, methodology details, and results, the agent becomes an expert on that specific paper, ready to answer follow-up questions, explain complex sections, and connect findings to the broader literature.

This approach is especially valuable for interdisciplinary researchers who need to quickly understand papers outside their primary expertise, for journal clubs seeking deeper discussion, and for students learning to critically evaluate published research.

Paper Parsing Workflow

The agent should follow this structured workflow when converting a paper to an interactive agent:

Step 1: Structure Extraction

• Identify the paper's sections (abstract, introduction, methods, results, discussion, references)
• Extract the title, authors, affiliations, and publication venue
• Identify figure and table captions along with their referenced locations
• Note supplementary materials and their availability
• Detect the paper type (empirical, theoretical, review, meta-analysis)

Step 2: Claim Extraction

• Identify the primary research question or hypothesis
• Extract all major claims made in the paper
• Map each claim to its supporting evidence (data, citations, arguments)
• Note the strength of evidence for each claim (strong, moderate, suggestive)
• Identify limitations acknowledged by the authors

Step 3: Methodology Mapping

• Document the complete experimental or analytical pipeline
• Extract parameter values, dataset descriptions, and evaluation metrics
• Identify software tools and libraries used
• Note any preprocessing or data cleaning steps
• Map the methodology to established frameworks in the field

Interactive Exploration Capabilities

Once a paper has been parsed, the agent can support these interaction patterns:

Question-Answering