Qinyan Academic Skills
A 183-skill, 18-category academic toolbox that spans paper search, grant writing (including NSFC/NSSFC), bioinformatics, drug discovery, and clinical medicine — installable one skill, one category, or all at once.
Last reviewed by the paperbanana team on Jul 13, 2026
Install
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/LeonChaoX/qinyan-academic-skills/main/install.sh | bashWhat is Qinyan Academic Skills?
Qinyan Academic Skills is a large aggregation repository maintained by LeonChaoX that bundles 183 AI agent skills into 18 research-domain categories, targeted at academic work in the broadest sense: literature search, scientific writing, academic posters and slides, research methodology, bioinformatics and genomics, cheminformatics and drug discovery, clinical medicine, protein engineering, machine learning, materials science, statistics, scientific databases, lab automation, document processing, finance/economics data, geospatial analysis, and platform infrastructure. Rather than writing every skill from scratch, the repository explicitly credits its two main upstream sources — K-Dense-AI/claude-scientific-skills (170+ skills) and luwill/research-skills — and layers five original "Qinyan Academic" skills (paper search, paper analysis, paper polish, citation search, and topic analysis) backed by the Qinyan Academic OpenAPI on top.
What distinguishes Qinyan Academic Skills from a plain skill dump is its installer tooling. A single `install.sh` script supports installing everything, installing by numbered category (e.g. `-c 05` for bioinformatics and genomics), installing a single named skill (e.g. `-s scanpy`), searching across all skill descriptions (`--search 蛋白质` or `--search drug`), and checking/applying updates without clobbering local edits unless `--force` is passed. It also targets six different coding-agent runtimes — Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Gemini CLI, OpenClaw, and OpenCode — each with its own global and project-scoped install directory, so a lab can standardize one skill catalog across whatever tool each member happens to use.
For Chinese-affiliated researchers specifically, Qinyan Academic Skills is one of the few catalogs in this directory with dedicated National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC / 国家自然科学基金) and National Social Science Fund of China (NSSFC / 国家社会科学基金) proposal-writing skills, updated to the 2026 and 2025 formatting rules respectively, alongside a general research-grants skill covering NSF/NIH/DOE/DARPA for international funding. Combined with 61 skills across bioinformatics, drug discovery, and clinical medicine (categories 05–08), this makes it a practical single install for a mixed-methods lab that needs both grant paperwork and computational research tooling in one place.
Core capabilities
Selective installation by category, skill, or keyword
install.sh supports `--list` and `--list-skills` to browse, `-c <number>` to install a whole category (e.g. 05 = bioinformatics, 21 skills), `-s <name>` for a single skill, and `--search <term>` to find skills by keyword in Chinese or English.
Multi-agent, multi-scope targeting
The `--tool` flag installs into Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Gemini CLI, OpenClaw, or OpenCode, each with distinct global (`~/.claude/skills/`, etc.) and `--project`-scoped directories.
National grant-proposal writing (NSFC / NSSFC)
nsfc-proposal covers Chinese youth/excellent-young/distinguished-young NSFC applications under 2026 rules; nssfc-proposal covers key/general/youth/western-region NSSFC annual projects under 2025 rules, including anonymized loose-leaf sections.
Bioinformatics and clinical medicine depth
21 skills for genomics and single-cell analysis (scanpy, pydeseq2, scvi-tools) and 18 for clinical/precision medicine (clinical trials, variant interpretation, medical imaging, clinical decision support), alongside 12 skills for cheminformatics and drug discovery.
Version tracking and safe updates
`--check-update` and `--update` (optionally `--update -s <skill>` or `--force`) let you refresh individual skills or the whole set without silently overwriting local customizations unless forced.
Academic presentation and visualization skills
Nine skills for posters, slide decks (17 visual styles with automatic chart extraction), LaTeX posters, scientific schematics, and data visualization, plus infographics in 10 types and 8 styles.
What you can use it for
Preparing an NSFC or NSSFC grant application
Install just the research-methods category (04) to get nsfc-proposal or nssfc-proposal, which follow the current-year formatting and anonymization requirements for Chinese national funding bodies.
Running a single-cell RNA-seq analysis pipeline
Install category 05 (bioinformatics and genomics) for scanpy, pydeseq2, anndata, and scvelo to go from raw sequencing data to differential-expression results and figures.
Searching literature across Chinese and international databases
Use qinyan-paper-search for Google Scholar/PubMed/ArXiv/Wanfang coverage, or install category 01 for OpenAlex, bioRxiv, and PubMed database skills plus Zotero integration via pyzotero.
Building a paper-derived slide deck or poster for a conference
Install paper-slide-deck (category 03) to auto-generate a presentation with extracted figures in one of 17 visual styles, or latex-posters / pptx-posters for a print poster.
Standardizing skills across a lab that mixes Claude Code, Cursor, and Codex users
Run the installer once per tool with `--tool cursor`, `--tool codex`, etc., so every lab member gets the same 183-skill catalog regardless of which coding agent they prefer.
How to get started
- 1
Install everything with the one-line installer
Run `curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/LeonChaoX/qinyan-academic-skills/main/install.sh | bash` to install all 183 skills into `~/.claude/skills/` by default.
- 2
Or install selectively by category or skill
Append `-c 05` to install just a category (e.g. bioinformatics) or `-s scanpy` to install a single named skill; use `--search <keyword>` first if you are not sure which skill you need.
- 3
Target a different agent or project scope
Add `--tool cursor` (or codex/gemini/openclaw/opencode) to install for a different coding agent, and `--project` to scope the install to the current project instead of your home directory.
- 4
Keep the catalog current
Periodically run `--check-update` to see if new skills or fixes are available, then `--update` (or `--update --force` to override local edits) to pull them in.
How it compares to similar skills
Qinyan Academic Skills is best understood as a curated re-packaging of two large upstream skill libraries plus a handful of proprietary paper-search skills, aimed at breadth and multi-agent compatibility rather than a single opinionated pipeline.
AI Research Skills
Pick ai-research-skills if you want to go straight to one of the upstream scientific-skill libraries this repository packages, without the Qinyan-specific grant and paper-search additions.
Medical Research Skills
Pick medical-research-skills if your work is purely clinical/biomedical — it offers deeper, purpose-built coverage (500+ skills) of that single discipline than Qinyan Academic Skills’ shared 18-category catalog.
Academic Research Skills
Pick academic-research-skills if you want one opinionated research-to-publication pipeline with citation-integrity gates, rather than an installable menu of 183 independent skills.