effortless-academic-skills

Build a Wikipedia-style Obsidian knowledge network from academic PDFs, or expand an existing one with new papers. Use when the user wants to create a concept network, knowledge graph, or Obsidian world from papers — or add new papers to one already built. Trigger phrases include build an Obsidian world, create a knowledge network, extract concepts into Obsidian, build a knowledge graph, turn papers into an Obsidian vault, add this paper to my vault, expand my knowledge network, I have new papers to add, update the world with these papers. Use proactively whenever multiple PDFs are provided alongside mentions of Obsidian, concepts, or knowledge organisation.

Plan and scaffold an academic introduction section from source papers, context, or rough notes. Use this skill whenever Ilya wants to structure an intro, outline a paper's opening, map the literature into a writing plan, figure out what paragraphs an introduction needs, or asks "what should my intro cover?", "help me plan my introduction", "outline an intro from these papers", "what topics should I introduce?", "scaffold my intro section", "turn these papers into an intro plan", or "structure my background section". Also trigger when the user uploads or pastes papers/abstracts and wants to know what to write about — even if they don't say "introduction" explicitly. This skill does NOT write the prose; it produces a clear paragraph-by-paragraph blueprint that guides writing. For the actual prose, hand off to ea-academic-writer.

Critique and improve academic writing at the paragraph level, or produce new academic paragraphs from scratch. Use this skill whenever the user pastes academic text and wants feedback, revision suggestions, or a rewrite; when they ask to "improve this paragraph", "critique my writing", "make this more academic", "help me write a paragraph about X", or asks for academic prose with a specific argument. Also trigger when the user provides a topic, claim, or rough notes and wants them shaped into a polished academic paragraph. Always use for academic writing tasks — even if the request is phrased casually.

Extracts and analyses empirical results from primary research papers, summarising each result, explaining its importance, and decomposing the discussion into supporting or contrasting citations. Use this skill whenever the user pastes a paper, uploads a PDF, or shares a results/discussion section and wants to understand what was found and how it fits the literature. Trigger on phrases like "analyse this paper's results", "what did this paper find", "extract the results", "break down the discussion", "what papers support or contrast this result", "help me ground this paper in the literature", "summarise the findings", or "what's the discourse around these results". Also trigger when the user is building a literature review and needs to understand what a specific study found and how its discussion situates the results in prior work. Do NOT use for review papers, detect these early and refuse gracefully (see below).

Extracts atomic sentences from academic papers — identify every cited paper, compress each citation into a single logical claim, group them by sub-topic, and summarize each group. Use this skill whenever the user pastes academic text or uploads a PDF and wants to extract what cited papers actually claimed, map the literature, build a citation map, extract key arguments from a paper, atomize citations, or asks things like "what does each paper say?", "extract the key claims", "give me an atomic breakdown of this paper", "pull out all the references and their arguments", "summarize the citations by topic", or "elaborate on [Author Year]". Also trigger when the user is preparing a literature review, working in Obsidian/Zotero/Notion and needs structured citation blocks, or uploads a PDF with a request to extract referenced claims. This skill is essential any time someone is working with dense academic text and needs to see what all the cited sources actually argued.