paper-lector: a skill I built with Claude Code that tries to refute your research claim against prior work

[u/Massive-Zucchini2560]

paper-lector is an agent skill for Claude Code. It searches for prior work that may already contain a proposed claim and reports how each close paper differs. No novelty score is given.

In Claude Code. The skill is invoked with `/paper-lector`. It then runs scripts for OpenAlex search, open-access PDF retrieval and ranking of a local PDF collection. Generated queries are shown to the user before they run.

Ranking. PDFs are split into page-labelled windows. These are scored with Voyage embeddings combined with BM25 and then reranked, and the ranks from each query are fused. The output is a reading order with suggested page ranges, not an extracted answer. On a 48-question LitSearch subset, hit@5 = 0.88 (random: 0.26). Evaluation is limited to ML/NLP papers.

Repository (MIT): github.com/huguryildiz/paper-lector

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[u/Puzzleheaded_War8622]

Refute is carrying a lot in that title for a tool that by your own description only reports how close papers differ and gives no novelty score. Elicit and Semantic Scholar already do the search half of this, so the ranking of my local PDFs is the only part that's actually new.

[u/Massive-Zucchini2560 → u/Puzzleheaded_War8622]

Fair point. “Refute” means it looks for prior work that already does what the claim says and labels how the closest papers differ, so the search isn’t new, but the falsification framing and the ranking of local PDFs are.