Agent Skill

Firecrawl Research Index skill

firecrawl-research-indexfirecrawl/cliskills/firecrawl-research-index/SKILL.md

Find the papers that answer a research query in Firecrawl's research paper index — a corpus of paper abstracts whose largest share is biomedical and life-science literature (PubMed, bioRxiv, medRxiv), alongside arXiv preprints in CS, physics, and math — using semantic search, semantic and structural expansion, and in-body verification. Use this skill for literature-finding and paper-retrieval tasks of any kind, including clinical, biomedical, drug, gene, disease, and other life-science questions, whether the answer is a single paper or a full multi-paper set. The index is reached only through the `firecrawl_research_*` MCP tools or the `firecrawl research` CLI subcommands. Calling `firecrawl_search` with its `categories` option set to `["research"]` is a different feature — it filters ordinary web search to research-affiliated websites (the list includes PubMed, bioRxiv, medRxiv, arXiv, and publisher sites) and returns page results from them, without querying the paper records in this index.

661

always on

226 tokname + description

once used

2,050 tokSKILL.md body

bundled files

repo stars

661GitHub

Install the Firecrawl Research Index skill

Skills CLI (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor and others)

npx skills add https://github.com/firecrawl/cli --skill firecrawl-research-index

Claude Code, by hand (all projects)

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/firecrawl/cli.git /tmp/cli
mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills
cp -R /tmp/cli/skills/firecrawl-research-index ~/.claude/skills/firecrawl-research-index

For one project only, copy the folder into .claude/skills/ in that project instead. The agent picks it up when a task matches its description.

What it costs your context

Agent Skills load in three steps. Tokens counted with the o200k tokenizer; your model's count will differ a little.

When	What loads	Cost
Every session	Name and description	226 tok
When the agent uses it	The SKILL.md instructions	2,050 tok
Only if opened	No bundled files	—

Until it is used, firecrawl-research-index costs about 6.0× less than the median MCP server we measured (1,362 tokens on every turn). Installing all 13 skills from firecrawl/cli would load 897 tokens of descriptions. Skills vs MCP study

Checks

Our checks found nothing to flag: it follows the Agent Skills specification's naming and size guidelines and doesn't pipe downloads into a shell.

Checked 2026-10-22 · method

What's inside

The headings of its SKILL.md. Read the full file on GitHub.

Firecrawl Research Index
What is in the index
The tools, and what each is uniquely good at
Match the approach to the query
Principles
See also

More skills from firecrawl/cli

All skills in this repo

firecrawlfirecrawl/cli
Any live-web task via the Firecrawl CLI — including ordinary web research: searching the web, reading or extracting pages, gathering sources, discovering site URLs, bulk extraction, downloading a site, change alerts, or pages needing clicks/login — web only; local files route to firecrawl-parse. For US legal or regulatory questions use gov; for papers use firecrawl-research-index; for library, API, error, or bug questions use firecrawl-developer-index.
103k97 tok idle · 2,608 in use
firecrawl-searchfirecrawl/cli
Find web sources with query-relevant page excerpts and optional full-page content, and discover workflows, data APIs, and indexes. Use for web research or finding structured records, listings, transcripts, and datasets. Supports semantic tool discovery, domain matching, and progressive catalogue browsing.
84k58 tok idle · 2,938 in use
firecrawl-scrapefirecrawl/cli
Read a known webpage or execute a discovered workflow or data-provider capability. Use for page content or structured results once the URL or tool is selected.
83k35 tok idle · 2,002 in use
firecrawl-agentfirecrawl/cli
Autonomously navigate websites and extract structured data across pages. Use when the task requires navigation or no suitable ready-made workflow or data provider covers it.
81k34 tok idle · 1,080 in use
firecrawl-crawlfirecrawl/cli
Bulk-extract many pages from one site or section. Use for "crawl", "everything under /docs", or content spanning linked pages.
81k33 tok idle · 396 in use
firecrawl-mapfirecrawl/cli
Discover and list a site's URLs, with search filtering. Use for "map the site" or "find the URL for" requests — when the user knows the site but not the exact page, or wants site structure.
80k48 tok idle · 347 in use
firecrawl-downloadfirecrawl/cli
Save a site or section as local files (markdown, screenshots). Use for "download the site", offline docs, or a local copy for reference.
80k34 tok idle · 426 in use
firecrawl-interactfirecrawl/cli
Drive a live browser on a scraped page: click, fill forms, log in, paginate, infinite-scroll. Use when content requires interaction or a scrape failed or returned incomplete content.
65k41 tok idle · 630 in use