🇬🇧 English | 🇨🇳 简体中文 | 🇯🇵 日本語 | 🇰🇷 한국어

CNKI-VIP Reader

Chinese Academic Literature Auto-Search & Reader Skill for AI Agents

cnki-vip-reader empowers any AI agent to automatically log in to Chinese literature relay platforms, batch search CNKI (知网) and VIP (维普), download full-text PDFs, and read them structurally. For CNKI's proprietary PDF font encoding corruption, a built-in multimodal visual fallback mechanism delegates screenshot recognition to a vision-capable sub-agent, completely bypassing traditional OCR limitations.

🎯 Runs on Any Agent Platform

This Skill is written as a platform-agnostic workflow specification. It works wherever your agent has access to a browser tool (Playwright/Puppeteer) and a bash/shell tool:

Platform	Status
OpenHanako	✅ Full support — browser + bash + subagent
Claude Code	✅ bash tool + custom Playwright MCP
Codex / Hana	✅ browser + bash + subagent
Custom MCP Agent	✅ Any agent with browser automation capability
LangChain / CrewAI	✅ Adapt the SKILL.md to your agent's tool definitions

The core workflow lives in SKILL.md — a human-and-machine-readable instruction file. You adapt the tool invocations (browser start, bash, web_search) to whatever your agent platform calls them.

📄 Documentation

Quick Start

Install Dependencies

pip install playwright
playwright install chromium

Configure

cp config.example.json config.json
# Edit config.json with your relay platform credentials

Or via environment variables:

export RELAY_USERNAME="your_account"
export RELAY_PASSWORD="your_password"

Give the Skill to Your Agent

OpenHanako — copy to skills directory:

cp -r cnki-vip-reader/ ~/.hanako/skills/

Claude Code — add to CLAUDE.md or as a project skill:

# Reference SKILL.md as a custom instruction file
claude --custom-instructions ./SKILL.md

Custom Agent — feed SKILL.md into your agent's system prompt or tool context.

Usage

Talk to your agent naturally:

"Search CNKI for Transformer attention mechanisms"
"Search VIP for lightweight face recognition"
"Download paper #1, #3, and #5"

The agent reads SKILL.md and executes the workflow automatically.

✨ Features

Feature	Description
🔍 Dual-Database Search	Simultaneously search CNKI & VIP, output structured bibliographies
📥 No-Popup Download	Playwright script with cookie injection, bypasses download confirmations
📖 Full-Text Reading	Structured reading with side-by-side translation support
🖼️ Multimodal Fallback	Screenshots → vision sub-agent recognition when CNKI fonts corrupt text extraction
🔐 Cookie Reuse	Log in once, skip CAPTCHAs on subsequent operations
⚡ Relay Mode	Works through a third-party relay, no institutional VPN required
🌐 Platform Agnostic	Runs on OpenHanako, Claude, Codex, or any agent with browser + shell tools

🏗️ Architecture

┌──────────────────┐     ┌──────────────┐     ┌──────────────┐
│  Any AI Agent    │────▶│  cnki-vip-   │────▶│  Literature   │
│  (OpenHanako/    │◀────│  reader      │◀────│  Relay (BYO)  │
│   Claude/Codex)  │     └──────┬───────┘     └──────────────┘
└──────────────────┘            │
                   ┌────────────▼────────────┐
                   │  Playwright Headless     │
                   │  Browser (download PDF)  │
                   └────────────┬────────────┘
                                │
              ┌─────────────────┼─────────────────┐
              ▼                 ▼                 ▼
         ┌────────┐      ┌──────────┐      ┌──────────┐
         │CNKI CAJ│      │ VIP PDF  │      │Screenshot│
         │  Download│     │ Download │      │ Fallback │
         └────┬───┘      └────┬─────┘      └────┬─────┘
              │                │                  │
              ▼                ▼                  ▼
         ┌──────────────────────────────────────────┐
         │  Structured Full-Text Reading & Analysis  │
         └──────────────────────────────────────────┘

🚀 Workflow

Phase	Action
1. Login	Agent auto-fills credentials → OCR CAPTCHA → cookie persistence
2A. CNKI Search	Navigate to CNKI proxy → keyword search → bibliography extraction → download
2B. VIP Search (recommended)	Navigate to VIP → CARSI auth → search → PDF download
3. Reading	PDF extracted → structured full-text interpretation
4. Fallback	CNKI font corruption → screenshot per page → vision sub-agent OCR → merge to .md

📊 Supported Platforms & Methods

Platform	Search	Bibliography	PDF	CAJ	Corruption Fix
VIP (维普)	✅	✅	✅ Playwright	N/A	N/A (standard PDF)
CNKI (知网)	✅	✅	⚠️ corrupted	✅	Phase 4: screenshot + vision

⚠️ Prerequisites

This repository does NOT include the relay platform itself. You must deploy or obtain a literature relay that supports:

• CNKI reverse-proxy to search interface
• VIP CARSI institutional authentication
• User login & cookie management

After deployment, replace YOUR_RELAY_HOST, YOUR_CNKI_PROXY and other placeholders in SKILL.md with your actual addresses.

📦 File Structure

cnki-vip-reader/
├── README.md                     ← This file (English)
├── README.zh-CN.md               ← 简体中文
├── README.ja.md                  ← 日本語
├── README.ko.md                  ← 한국어
├── SKILL.md                      ← Core workflow specification
├── LICENSE                       ← MIT License
├── assets/
│   └── social-preview.png        ← Repository cover image
├── .gitignore
├── config.example.json           ← Credentials template
└── scripts/
    └── download_vip_pdf.py       ← No-popup PDF/CAJ download script

🤝 Contributing

Issues and PRs welcome.

• Report bugs → GitHub Issues
• Contribute code → Fork → Feature Branch → PR
• Share your relay platform adapters
• Help translate README to more languages

📬 Contact

If you encounter configuration issues, feel free to reach out via QQ:

• QQ: 3297767619
• Nickname: unique&williams

📄 License

MIT © 2025 Guowei Jiang (@lechan775)