paper-strategist

Paper Strategist

Purpose

Turn a research idea, draft, or result bundle into a defensible paper plan before drafting begins. This skill is the first gate for paper quality: it decides what the paper is really claiming, what evidence is needed, and what reviewers are likely to attack.

When To Use

• Starting a new paper from notes, experiments, or a rough idea.
• Repositioning a rejected or weak draft.
• Choosing between ICLR/CVPR/NeurIPS/ICML/ECCV/AAAI/TMI/arXiv targets.
• Checking whether the current contribution story is strong enough to support a full paper.

Inputs

Required:

• target venue and year;
• working title or one-paragraph project summary;
• paper type: method, benchmark, system, theory, application, clinical study, challenge paper, survey, or extension;
• main contributions;
• available evidence: experiments, figures, tables, theorems, user/reader studies, clinical validation, or ablations;
• known related work and direct competitors.

Optional:

• draft abstract or introduction;
• target page limit;
• code/data release plan;
• privacy/IRB constraints for medical papers;
• rejected reviews or prior reviewer comments.

Procedure

1. Classify the paper type. Decide what kind of proof the paper needs. A method paper needs mechanism and experiments; a benchmark paper needs dataset/task validity; a TMI paper needs validation scope and clinical relevance.

2. Extract the central thesis. Write one sentence in the form: "This paper shows that <method/idea> enables for <task/context>, supported by ."

3. Separate contributions from features. A contribution is a claim a reviewer can evaluate. A feature is merely something the system does.

4. Build the claim hierarchy. Create one central claim, 2-4 supporting claims, and evidence required for each.

5. Identify the reviewer contract. State what the paper must prove for a fair reviewer to accept the story.

6. Identify likely attacks. List novelty, soundness, baseline, ablation, clarity, reproducibility, ethics, and venue-fit risks.