paper-refinement-skills

Paper Refinement Skills

Overview

Use this skill when revising academic papers section by section. Preserve verified technical claims, keep terminology consistent, and adapt tone and density to the target venue.

Incremental Maintenance

• For a local number, caption, or format fix, reuse the established paper story and table contract. Verify the scoped source and connected text only; do not restart story questioning, re-freeze the contract, run a full literature review, or rerun experiments for cosmetic-only changes.

Workflow

1. Read the target sentence, paragraph, and immediate surrounding context before editing.
2. Identify whether the problem is structural or local: argument flow, scope, redundancy, terminology drift, or sentence quality.
3. Identify the paper story before polishing: dataset/benchmark, method, analysis, or system. Experiments should support that story, not read like a run log.
4. Freeze the claim hierarchy: one central paper claim first, with ablations, reliability studies, and diagnostics presented only as supporting evidence.
5. Revise conservatively: preserve verified claims, datasets, equations, and citations unless the user explicitly asks to change them.
6. When a passage is repeatedly misunderstood, fix the ambiguity at its source instead of only softening nearby claims.
7. When confusion comes from a category error, fix the category boundary before polishing the sentence. Separate dataset/protocol contents from diagnostic experiments, model design from evaluation controls, and baseline-conversion fairness from the paper's main contribution.
8. Check the revised passage against the rest of the paper for claim consistency, notation, references, figure/table links, and rendering risks.
9. After a figure or table changes, search nearby and later prose for stale terminology, old row names, obsolete panel structure, and implementation leakage. A consistent table has a matching body, caption, and local explanatory paragraph. If a new row is added to a delta-coded or reference-coded table, the prose must name the comparison reference and report movement in the same direction as the table cells. Read new numeric values from the project's source summary or artifact, check precision, reference, metric direction, and delta sign, and sync the scoped caption, nearby prose, and cross-references.
10. Promote only reusable cross-paper heuristics into this skill, and update it or its references only with explicit user authorization. Exclude private project details from the reusable workflow.