scientific-reporting

name

scientific-reporting

description

Report contract and artifact hygiene for the write-up — required sections (methods, uncertainties, verification, limitations, references), figure standards, subagent attribution, and durable-output discipline. Use when writing a scientific report, a results summary for a researcher, or producing durable deliverables (figures, CSVs, code, markdown) — i.e. while communicating results, not while computing them.

Scientific Reporting

When to use

Read this skill whenever the deliverable includes a written report, a results summary for a scientist, or durable artifacts (figures, CSVs, code) that a researcher will reuse.

Report contract

A frontier-quality report has these sections; omit one only when it is genuinely empty, and then say so explicitly:

1. System / Problem — equations, parameters, and conventions, with units.
2. Methods — algorithms by name, step sizes, transients, durations, seeds, initial conditions. Enough to reproduce without reading the code.
3. Results with uncertainties — every decision-relevant number carries ± spread or a stated resolution limit. Tables and CSVs include the uncertainty column, not bare point estimates.
4. Verification — what was independently checked, by whom: attribute delegated checks to the subagent by name and quote its key numbers next to yours. "Consistent" without numbers is not verification.
5. Limitations — finite observation time, integrator artifacts, multistability / initial-condition dependence, parameter ranges not explored, and any unresolved discrepancies with known results.
6. Known results / references — when the system is canonical, a short comparison against commonly known behavior, named at the textbook/author level only when confident. Never invent precise citations; absence of a literature comparison must be stated, not silent.

Figure standards

• Every figure: axis labels with units, title or caption stating parameters, legend when more than one series, 300 DPI for static exports.
• Reference each figure from the report text near the claim it supports — no orphan figures, no figures dumped at the end.

Artifact hygiene

• /outputs/ (durable) holds only artifacts a researcher should keep: final code, final figures, data tables, the report. Each durable artifact must be referenced from the report with one line on what it contains.
• Debug, diagnose, and scratch scripts go under /workspace/diagnostics/ (never /outputs/); the backend skips that directory when collecting durable artifacts, and unreferenced top-level workspace scripts are not collected either — a top-level script becomes durable only when the report or final answer names it.
• Name artifacts descriptively (bifurcation_diagram.png, not plot2.png), and keep names stable across follow-up runs that revise them.

Communication

• Lead the final answer with the conclusion and its confidence, then the evidence; keep the full detail in the report artifact.
• Report wall-clock session time and inner compute time as separate labeled numbers when runtime is mentioned at all.
• State explicitly which subtask was delegated, to which subagent, and what came back — the reader should be able to audit the division of labor.