paper-details

Paper Details

Conventions for producing a detailed Markdown explainer of an academic paper. The aim of this skill is to describe the paper accurately, not to critique it.

This skill follows the shared sourced-writing conventions defined in documenting-with-sources. Read documenting-with-sources before drafting.

1. Deliverable structure

1.0 Output location

Write the explainer as a .md file under the project's reports/ directory, where "the project" is the root that contains the source paper PDF. Create the directory if it does not exist.

• Path: {project-root}/reports/{paper-filename-base}.md
• Example: if the PDF is at /path/to/project/papers/foo.pdf, the output is /path/to/project/reports/foo.md

Do not write next to the PDF, and do not write at the project root. Do not ask the user for the output path — determine it mechanically by the rule above.

1.1 Opening

In this order:

1. Title (# {paper title} — Detailed Explainer)
2. Bibliographic info (authors, affiliations, venue, year, arXiv/DOI, URL)
3. Full abstract — quote the original in a code block per writing-quotation; if the original is in a non-working language, place the translation alongside as a separate paragraph in the same block.

1.2 Body section structure

The body's section structure follows the paper's. If the paper has Section 1 Introduction, Section 2 Method, Section 3 Results, ..., the explainer uses the same order and the same headings.

Add explainer-only sections (e.g. "Strengths of the paper", "Limitations of the paper", "Source list") after the paper's own section structure.

1.3 Bullet lists vs prose

Pick the form by the nature of the content.

• Bullet lists fit enumerations of parallel items — variable lists, definitions of evaluation metrics, table-column descriptions, comparison points between methods, etc. When the content is genuinely list-shaped, the prose form blurs the boundaries between items.
• Prose fits relationships, causal flow, contextual explanation. When the reader needs to understand why items appear together or how they form a single argument, prose is what holds it together.