neuromechanist/research-skills/paper-review

Academic Manuscript Review

Routes a manuscript to an independent, fresh-context reviewer that evaluates it for methodological soundness, statistical validity, logical consistency, and reproducibility, and returns a structured peer review. This skill is a thin dispatcher: it decides how to run the reviewer and in which mode. The review procedure, checklists, statistical and figure guides, principles, and output template all live in references/ and are loaded by the reviewer, not duplicated here.

When to use

Activate when the user wants peer-review feedback on a manuscript (journal article, conference paper, preprint).

Why a fresh-context reviewer

Review validity depends on independence: a reviewer that shares the conversation that produced the manuscript is biased toward it. Run the reviewer in a separate context and pass only framing (manuscript path, target journal, manuscript type, revision status), never the authoring rationale. This is why the reviewer is a subagent on tools that support one, and an inline procedure where they do not.

Modes (user decides each run)

• Single (default): one independent reviewer applies the full procedure end to end.
• Panel (opt-in): spawn independent reviewers in parallel on complementary lenses, then a synthesis pass. Trigger on "review panel", "multiple reviewers", or an explicit request. Lenses: methods/design, statistics, and novelty/significance (add reproducibility for methods-heavy or hardware papers). Each reviewer reads the whole manuscript but weights its lens and scores independently from references/; a final synthesis pass merges them into one Critical/Major/Minor review and surfaces genuine disagreement rather than averaging it away.

Dispatch

Pick the branch for the current tool. In every branch the reviewer follows references/review-procedure.md.

• Claude Code: Agent(subagent_type: "manuscript:paper-review", ...) passing the manuscript path, target journal/type, and mode. For panel mode, issue one Agent call per lens in a single message so they run in parallel, then a final synthesis Agent call.
• Codex CLI: plugin installation exposes this skill, not a Codex subagent. To use a fresh-context Codex reviewer, first copy agents/templates/paper-review.toml to ~/.codex/agents/ or .codex/agents/, then invoke that configured agent if the current Codex surface supports /agent. For panel mode, ensure max_threads covers the lens count. If no Codex subagent is configured or available, use the fallback branch.
• Copilot CLI: plugin installation exposes this skill and, through .github/plugin/plugin.json, the .agent.md reviewer in agents/templates/. Invoke that configured agent when the current Copilot surface supports custom agents; use /fleet for panel mode when available. If running outside a plugin install, copy agents/templates/paper-review.agent.md to .github/agents/ or ~/.copilot/agents/. If no custom agent is available, use the fallback branch.
• Fallback (no subagent support, or the user wants an interactive in-thread review): first locate the rubric ($CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT/skills/paper-review/references, else find . -type d -path '*/skills/paper-review/references' | head -1); if it cannot be found, stop and tell the user to install the manuscript plugin rather than reviewing from memory. Then follow references/review-procedure.md directly in this context.

The brain (do not duplicate into dispatch or agent shells)

• references/review-procedure.md -- step-by-step procedure: intake, read, methodology, logic, literature, reproducibility, figures, writing, output.
• references/methodology-checklist.md, references/statistical-review-guide.md, references/figure-review-guide.md -- the assessment checklists and guides.
• references/review-principles.md -- review philosophy and severity calibration.
• references/review-output-template.md -- the Synopsis / Critical / Major / Minor / References / Editor Note format.
• examples/sample-manuscript-review.md -- worked review for calibration; examples/sample-manuscript-excerpt.md -- sample manuscript input for testing.
• Sister skill manuscript:humanizer (invoke through the host's skill-invocation mechanism) -- AI-writing patterns to flag in the prose-quality pass.