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techne:paper-review

A pre-submission novelty and reviewer pass for a draft paper — checks whether each contribution is actually new, what related work the draft misses, whether its claims hold up, and whether it overlaps a lab or co-author line that must be disclosed. Every judgment is grounded in a real retrieved paper, never asserted from memory.

When to use

  • A first-author draft is approaching submission: "review <name> for novelty", "what related work am I missing", "is this contribution new".
  • NOT for copy-editing prose or for a paper with no stated contributions yet — scaffold first with techne:paper.

Usage

/techne:paper-review <name> [--from <repo>]

Reads the ## paper-review section of .claude/skill-context.md (overlap source of truth, retrieval substrate, report path), extracts the draft's contributions, retrieves comparable prior work from OpenAlex (web-search backstop; Semantic Scholar only with a key), and writes papers/<name>/novelty-review.md with four sections: novelty per contribution, related-work gaps, claim-support, and a lab-overlap disclosure section. Advisory only — it never edits the draft.

What it grounds

A mandatory pre-check (§0) first verifies the draft's own citations against authoritative records (arXiv API / OpenAlex / DOI): a fabricated id, an id that resolves to a different paper, or a mischaracterized claim about a cited work is a stop-ship finding. Then every novelty verdict cites a paper retrieved that run with a verbatim snippet, logged in a provenance appendix so the search is re-runnable. A verdict with no retrieved record is marked unverified. The lab-overlap section surfaces adjacency and a COPE disclosure checklist but renders no verdict — the solo-vs-lab boundary is a human agreement.

See also