manuscript-review-council

Manuscript Review Council

Run a journal-style review council instead of a single blended opinion. This skill is self-contained and works in both Codex and Claude Code.

The council definition lives in local files:

• role roster: references/reviewer-roles.md
• workflow and artifact bundle: references/council-workflow.md
• per-reviewer handoff template: templates/reviewer-brief.md
• editor synthesis template: templates/editor-meta-review.md

Instructions

1. Confirm the review context: manuscript or revision stage, target venue if known, desired decision scale, and whether the user wants a full review, triage, version comparison, or rebuttal assessment.
2. Gather the review packet before delegating:
   • manuscript text or accessible PDF/DOCX
   • title, abstract, main claims, methods snapshot, and figure or table list
   • user priorities such as novelty, rigor, statistics, reproducibility, or journal fit
   • prior reviews or author response if this is a revision
3. Normalize the manuscript into a shared packet for every reviewer. At minimum, preserve section boundaries, figure references, and the claims being evaluated. If the source is a PDF or DOCX, extract a sectioned text view before review. Use references/council-workflow.md for the packet contents.
4. Load the local council definition before delegating:
   • reviewer roles and activation rules: references/reviewer-roles.md
   • stage flow and artifact bundle: references/council-workflow.md
   • reviewer prompt skeleton: templates/reviewer-brief.md
   • editor synthesis skeleton: templates/editor-meta-review.md
5. Use the platform's native delegation primitive when available:
   • Codex: spawn specialist sub-agents or workers
   • Claude Code: spawn Task agents or equivalent delegated runs
   • If delegation is unavailable, emulate the same reviewer roles sequentially and keep outputs role-separated
6. Launch these three default reviewers in parallel:
   • Domain reviewer: novelty, significance, positioning against prior work, and overclaiming
   • Methods and statistics reviewer: design, controls, benchmarks, sample size, figure interpretation, and analysis validity
   • Skeptical reviewer: weakest links, alternate explanations, unsupported causal claims, and missing controls
7. Add support reviewers only when triggered by the manuscript:
   • Reproducibility reviewer for computational papers, code or data availability, workflow clarity, and parameter transparency
   • Ethics or compliance reviewer for human subjects, animal work, privacy, conflicts, dual-use, or citation bias concerns
   • Translational reviewer when the manuscript makes clinical, ecological, or deployment claims that need reality checks
8. Give every reviewer the same structured contract:
   • one-paragraph summary
   • top strengths
   • major concerns
   • minor concerns
   • must-fix experiments or analyses
   • confidence level
   • provisional recommendation: accept, minor_revision, major_revision, or reject
   • direct grounding in manuscript sections, figures, tables, or explicit missing information
9. Require reviewers to ground criticisms in the manuscript text or in clearly missing information. Do not invent citations, datasets, reviewer expectations, or unstated experiments.
10. Run a cross-review pass after the first round:

• compare disagreements
• merge duplicate concerns
• identify the few issues that actually drive the decision
• separate fatal flaws from fixable revision items

1. Capture a lightweight artifact bundle even if the user only asked for prose:
   • shared review packet
   • reviewer reports
   • disagreement or conflict notes
   • editor meta-review
   • validate deterministic paths and machine-readable issues against schemas/review-bundle.schema.json with skills/manuscript-review-council/scripts/validate_review_bundle.py
   • every source_roles entry must name a reviewer present in reviewer_reports: an issue is attributable or it is not an issue
   • running fewer than the three default reviewers requires a reduced_council_reason on the bundle
2. Write an editor meta-review that includes:

• headline recommendation
• rationale across novelty, rigor, evidence strength, clarity, reproducibility, and significance
• ranked major revisions
• ranked minor revisions
• questions for the authors
• a short decision letter or reviewer summary

1. If outside validation is needed, do targeted spot-checks instead of broad literature review:
   • use /polars-dovmed for claim-specific literature context
   • use /bio-logic for evidence-strength and causal-claim stress tests
   • never fabricate supporting papers
2. If the user wants polished review prose, a rebuttal outline, or a cleaned-up decision letter, use /scientific-writing after the council establishes the factual review skeleton.
   • Requests to rewrite manuscript prose or draft an author rebuttal/response letter route directly to /scientific-writing; do not start a council unless the user also asks for scientific critique or resolution assessment.
3. Preserve provenance in the final deliverable:
   • keep per-reviewer notes separate from the editor synthesis
   • point to sections, figures, or tables when possible
   • clearly mark inference versus explicit manuscript statement