verify-claims

Verify Claims

The claim-to-evidence gate. Reviewers attack the gap between what a paper asserts and what it shows — an unbacked "we are the first", a "state-of-the-art" with no comparison, a "significant improvement" with no test, a speedup stated in the text that the table does not support. This skill finds those candidate claims, makes the author map each to its evidence, and produces a claims matrix (claim · location · evidence · status) so the gap is visible and closeable before a reviewer finds it.

It is the content counterpart to verify-citations: that skill proves each reference in the .bib resolves to a real paper; this skill proves each load-bearing sentence in the prose is backed by something in this paper (a number, a figure, a table, an experiment) or a real citation. Run both before any draft, rebuttal, or camera-ready leaves the machine.

When to use

• The user asks to verify / audit / check claims (not citations): "are my claims supported?", "am I overclaiming?", "do my results match my tables?"
• Before a rebuttal — reviewers' top complaint is unsupported or overclaimed contributions; close the gaps first, or arm the rebuttal with the evidence.
• Before camera-ready or arXiv — last chance to soften an indefensible "first" or fix a number that drifted out of sync with a revised table.
• After polish-tables-figures regenerated a table, to confirm the prose still matches the new numbers.

Inputs

• The paper's .tex (main file; the script follows \input/\include). Find it next to the .bib, or via the file with \documentclass.
• The author, in the loop: the skill cannot decide whether a claim is true — it surfaces candidates and the author supplies (or admits the absence of) the evidence. Copilot, not pilot.
• Optional: .paper-memory/profile.yml — risk_appetite and contribution_type set how hard the author wants to push novelty vs. hedge (see Memory).

Process