9 Free Claude Code Skills for Medical Research Workflow

A radiology researcher who has used Claude Code daily for about a year has open-sourced a collection of 9 skills designed for medical research workflows. The skills cover most research tasks from literature searching to manuscript preparation and submission.

Available Skills

• search-lit — Searches PubMed, Semantic Scholar, and bioRxiv. Every citation is verified against the actual API before being included to prevent hallucinated references.
• check-reporting — Audits manuscripts against reporting guidelines (STROBE, STARD, TRIPOD+AI, PRISMA, ARRIVE, and more). Provides item-by-item PRESENT/PARTIAL/MISSING status.
• analyze-stats — Generates reproducible Python/R code for diagnostic accuracy, inter-rater agreement, survival analysis, meta-analysis, and demographics tables.
• make-figures — Creates publication-ready figures at 300 DPI: ROC curves, forest plots, flow diagrams (PRISMA/CONSORT/STARD), Bland-Altman plots, confusion matrices.
• design-study — Reviews study designs for data leakage, cohort logic issues, and reporting guideline fit before writing begins.
• write-paper — Full IMRAD manuscript pipeline with 8 phases from outline to submission-ready draft.
• present-paper — Analyzes papers, finds supporting references, and drafts speaker scripts for journal clubs or grand rounds.
• grant-builder — Structures grant proposals with significance, innovation, approach, and milestones sections.
• publish-skill — Meta-skill that helps package your own Claude Code skills for open-source distribution (PII audit, license check).

Key Design Features

The skills include anti-hallucination citation verification where search-lit never generates references from memory and verifies every DOI/PMID via API. Real checklists for STROBE, STARD, TRIPOD+AI, PRISMA, and ARRIVE are bundled (open-license ones). For copyrighted guidelines like CONSORT, the skill uses its knowledge but directs users to download the official checklist. Skills can call each other — for example, check-reporting can invoke make-figures to generate a missing flow diagram or analyze-stats to fill statistical gaps.

Installation

git clone https://github.com/aperivue/medical-research-skills.git
cp -r medical-research-skills/skills/* ~/.claude/skills/

Restart Claude Code after installation. The skills work with CLI, desktop app, and IDE extensions.

The GitHub repository is available at https://github.com/aperivue/medical-research-skills. The researcher notes that the same skill architecture could be adapted for different research domains, with publish-skill specifically built for that purpose.