---

name: obsidian-summarize description: Create paper summaries in Obsidian. Use when users want to summarize research papers, create literature notes, or add paper insights to their knowledge base. allowed-tools: Read,Bash,Write

Obsidian Paper Summary Skill

Create structured paper summaries in your Obsidian vault.

Prerequisites

Configuration file at config/config.json with Obsidian settings:

• obsidian.vault_path: Path to your Obsidian vault
• obsidian.papers_folder: Subfolder for paper notes (default: "Papers")

Usage

Create a paper summary:

Copycd /Users/varde/code/arxiv-zotero-obsidian && python3 .claude/skills/obsidian-summarize/scripts/create_summary.py \
  --arxiv-id "2401.12345" \
  --title "Paper Title" \
  --authors "Author One,Author Two" \
  --abstract "Paper abstract..." \
  --summary "Your summary of the paper..."

Available Options

Examples

Copy# Basic summary
python3 .claude/skills/obsidian-summarize/scripts/create_summary.py \
  --arxiv-id "1706.03762" \
  --title "Attention Is All You Need" \
  --authors "Ashish Vaswani,Noam Shazeer" \
  --abstract "The dominant sequence transduction models..." \
  --summary "Introduces the Transformer architecture..."

# Full summary with all fields
python3 .claude/skills/obsidian-summarize/scripts/create_summary.py \
  --arxiv-id "1706.03762" \
  --title "Attention Is All You Need" \
  --authors "Ashish Vaswani,Noam Shazeer" \
  --abstract "The dominant sequence transduction models..." \
  --published "2017-06-12" \
  --zotero-key "ABC123XYZ" \
  --summary "Introduces the Transformer architecture..." \
  --key-findings "Self-attention replaces recurrence|Achieves SOTA on translation|Parallelizable training" \
  --methodology "Encoder-decoder with multi-head attention" \
  --tags "transformer,attention,nlp"

Note Structure

The created note includes:

1. Frontmatter: YAML metadata (title, authors, dates, links)
2. Overview: Quick reference callout box
3. Abstract: Original paper abstract
4. Summary: Your summary
5. Key Findings: Bullet points
6. Methodology: Method description
7. Contributions: Main contributions
8. Limitations & Future Work: Critical analysis
9. Personal Notes: Your thoughts
10. Related Papers: Space for linking other notes

Output

Creates markdown file at: {vault_path}/{papers_folder}/{YYYY-MM-DD}-{title-slug}.md

Integration Workflow

Typical workflow with other skills:

1. arxiv-search: Find papers on a topic
2. zotero-add: Add selected papers to Zotero (get item_key)
3. obsidian-summarize: Create summary note with Zotero link

Copy# After adding to Zotero with item_key ABC123
python3 .claude/skills/obsidian-summarize/scripts/create_summary.py \
  --arxiv-id "2401.12345" \
  --title "Paper Title" \
  --authors "Author" \
  --zotero-key "ABC123" \
  --summary "Claude-generated summary here..."