Claude Skills for Academics (Beginner Guide, Part 2)

In this tutorial, we dive into what Claude skills are, how to create them, and how academics can use them to accomplish previously impossible tasks. Skills are an extremely versatile concept which can be easily shared among users and will therefore most likely remain in use as AI technology matures. This tutorial is part 2 of a tutorial series on Claude, Claude Code and CoWork. Check out part 1 for the basics on this AI technology.

You can use skills with a free version of Claude; however, the examples in the following tutorial will be in Claude co-work, which is not strictly necessary to create or use skills.

What are Claude Skills?

Claude Skill is, technically speaking, a text file with AI prompts along with reference files that can contain any type of supplementary information. It is almost identical to a custom GPT from OpenAI, which has been around for a long time. The skill is packaged and distributed as a *.skill or a *.zip file. Here is how a skill looks:

1. Each skill consists of a skill.md file and a few references that can be used. They can be referenced in the skill file. An md file stands for markdown and is a plain text format.
2. The contents of the skill file defin what the skill can do. The skill in the image shows how to create bases in Obsidian (see use case 2).
3. Create new bases by simply clicking the “+” button at the top

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How to add or install Skills?

Installing a skill takes about two minutes. The process is the same whether you are on the free plan or a paid plan.

1. Go to Settings in Claude.ai (or the Claude desktop app).
2. Open Customise, then select Skills (see previous screenshot)
3. To install a custom skill, click the + button and select Upload and select the skill’s .zip file. The skill will appear in your list and is immediately active.

Custom skills you upload remain private to your account. If you want to share a skill with a colleague, send them the .zip file directly. They install it the same way.

Where do I get Claude skills from?

One of the largest repositories for skills is skills.sh. The skills will often be stored in GitHub repositories, and you have to download them from there.

Type in the skill you are looking for, and chances are someone has already developed it.

Installing Claude Skills Step-by-Step

Many websites suggest installing skills via the command line. This might be too complicated, so instead we are going to download and install them manually.

Step 1: As an example, you can download my budding skill repository here (we will use it in the use case below). Start by downloading the whole repository:

Step 2: Next, unzip the download and find the skills you want to use inside of it. Zip these skill folders:

Step 3: Go to the Claude desktop app and select “customise” from the sidebar to install a skill

Step 4: Double-check the installation. After uploading the zip file, the skill will be installed, and you can use it by typing “/skill-name” into the chat. A pop-up should be revealed indicating that this skill is known.

For the use-cases below, you will also need to install Kepano’s Obsidian skills, which teach Claude to work with Obsidian. Once you have done this, let’s continue.

Use Case 1: Analysing Academic Papers

For those of you familiar with my work, you have heard about the atomic sentence method. The idea to break down academic writing into a series of short claims with references. These “atomic sentences” can then be recombined by you, like Lego blocks, to create new pieces of academic writing, which communicate exactly what you want to say. The best part is that because each sentence has a reference to a real paper, your writing comes out automatically with the right references. Read the tutorial below if you like the idea:

The “ea-atomic-sentences” skill will extract these sentences from another paper for you to recombine. Here is how it looks:

The skill is particularly useful when you are entering a new research area and need to quickly understand who argued what. Instead of reading 15 papers in full to map the theoretical landscape, you can run the skill on two or three key review papers and get an overview of the field’s major claims and fault lines.

It is also useful when you are writing your own introduction and need to get a lot of interesting factual statements to create a solid foundation for your paper.

Note: The result is not a substitute for reading the papers. It is a scaffold that helps you read more efficiently, by knowing in advance which papers make which arguments and by transforming these insights into a format that lends itself to academic writing.

Setting up a Project in Claude CoWork

A project in Claude Cowork bundles a set of instructions and gives Claude access to specific folders on your computer. For instance, if you want to create an overview of all the papers in your collection, you would need to grant it access to the folder containing them. That’s what projects are for. Conversations will then be saved to the scope of this particular project, and you can always come back to them. This process is very similar to the ChatGPT project feature. Here is how to setup a project:

This step is optional, but it makes working with large collections of files, like your Obsidian vault, much easier.

Use Case 2: Using Claude to Create Bases

Backlinks are the feature that makes Obsidian better than Notion because it allows you to aggregate your notes and display them in a database-like structure. Obsidian bases are even more powerful than Notion because they can be context-dependent and display different content based on the file that is currently open. You have never heard about Obsidian bases. Check out this beginner tutorial on Bases or the more advanced tutorial on context-dependent bases. Here is what a base of all papers in my Obsidian vault looks like:

Each row is a note in my vault with certain properties like title, journal, rating. The base pulls out those properties to display them in the table that you see here. However, this process can be quite technical. If you don’t know about Obsidian, start with this free course:

The developer of Obsidian, Kepano, recently published a skill that can create bases for you (bases, too, are just text-based files). For this use-case you need to install the skill “obsidian-bases” from his repository. After you have done this, you need to do the following steps to use it effectively:

1. Create a project in Claude-Code or Cowork and give it access to your Obsidian folder.
2. Describe what the base should display. You can discuss with Claude which properties you might need to add, and then let the AI do the work for you.
3. The end result will be a base file that you can copy and paste into Obsidian to open and view the table.

Here is how it looks in action:

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Use Case 3: Create your own skill with Skill-creator skill

One of the most powerful skills in Claude is the skill creator, which, as the name suggests, can create skills from prompts. The powerful thing about this skill is that once it has written an outline of the skill, it will run it through a series of tests, generate the output, and let you grade and provide feedback on it. Make the necessary changes and adjust that skill until it does exactly what you want. Once the skill is created, you can just save it with one click into your skill repository, and it will be stored with Claude. Let’s run through this process step-by-step:

Step 1: Tell Claude what you want. You can mention “/skill-creator”, but even if you don’t, Claude will be smart enough to understand which skill you want to use.

Step 2: A more complex skill: Claude will typically create an evaluation of the skill, showing you outputs with and without the skill and allowing you to submit reviews and corrections for any of the outputs. Click on the “Open the eval viewer” (1) link provided by Claude and scroll down to the bottom of the output in the evaluation sidebar (2) to leave feedback. When done, click “Submit all reviews” (3):

Step 3: Once you are done, tell Claude that you are ready by confirming in the main chat (1), and it will create a skill file which you can save with Claude (2).

Step 4: You can share the skill with others by simply giving them the generated *.skill file. You can rename the *.skill file into a *.zip file if you want to see what is inside.

Conclusion

Cloud skills are incredibly versatile constructs. They allow you to bundle and share AI behaviour. Currently, there is a boom in the world, with thousands of skills being published every single day. This is partially enabled by the fact that users can easily create their own skills using the skill-creator skill. Technically speaking, the skill is just a text file and some resources, compressed into a zip archive. Because it is so easy to create skills, the real challenge is to find the creativity to create skills that make you more productive. Take some time and experiment with creating them, so you get an understanding of what is possible. This alone will make you come back to the possibility of automating whenever you have to do something fairly simple repeatedly.

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