Alterlab PDF Extract

alterlab-ieu/alterlab-pdf-extract

Free Elicit-columns analog — ingest N PDFs (or any MarkItDown-supported document) and build a per-paper evidence table with user-defined columns, one row per paper and one column per attribute/question you want pulled from every source. Use when extracting structured data across many papers into a comparison table or data-extraction sheet (sample size, methods, main finding, effect, population/intervention/outcome, limitations), screening a corpus into a spreadsheet, or pulling the same fields from a stack of PDFs into CSV/Markdown. Routes conversion through MarkItDown; offline heuristic backend by default, optional LLM backend for precise answers. Part of the AlterLab Academic Skills suite.

6k tokens

context cost

the whole folder, loaded on every use

files

ships runnable scripts

copies elsewhere

how many repositories repackaged it

stars on the repo

on the repository, not the skill itself

Install

one command, takes just this skill from the repository

npx skills add https://github.com/AlterLab-IEU/AlterLab-Academic-Skills --skill alterlab-pdf-extract

How to use it

Copy the folder

Take alterlab-ieu/alterlab-pdf-extract from the repository into ~/.claude/skills for personal use, or into .claude/skills inside a project.

Check the name does not clash

The agent identifies a skill by the name field in its header. Two skills with the same name cannot sit side by side — one of them will be ignored.

Install what it needs

The instructions reference pip, uv. Without those the skill loads but fails at the first command.