| name | material-passport |
| description | Use before formal research writing or delivery to package source readiness, compliance or requirement evidence, citation boundaries, and unresolved confirmations for the artifact being moved forward. |
Material Passport
Use this skill when a formal research artifact is about to move from planning to drafting, drafting to review, or review to delivery.
Purpose
Create a compact evidence passport for the artifact so the agent does not treat a polished draft as ready when sources, requirements, compliance, citations, or open confirmations are still weak.
Activate For
- proposal, manuscript, thesis/dissertation section, report, grant, protocol, or reviewer/stakeholder-facing draft
- formal Word/PDF delivery
- citation-heavy or requirement-sensitive writing
- ethics, privacy, IRB, client, funder, journal, or institutional requirement claims
- any task entering
research-wiki/DOCUMENT_PIPELINE.md
Workflow
- Identify the artifact, audience, purpose, and output status.
- Choose passport scope:
short: internal planning or early draft movement; missing optional evidence becomes WARN.
full: reviewer-facing, stakeholder-facing, submission-facing, or final delivery; missing required evidence becomes HOLD.
- Check the strongest available local evidence:
- source-readiness record;
- compliance or requirement tracker;
- citation or claim-support report when citation-heavy;
- runtime receipt, source map, and integrity preflight for full-scope delivery.
- List unresolved
TO CONFIRM items.
- State the boundary clearly: the passport packages readiness evidence; it does not prove claim support, approval, acceptance, or official compliance.
Local Tool
python3 scripts/material_passport.py --artifact <path> --scope short
python3 scripts/material_passport.py --artifact <path> --scope full --audience reviewer-facing
Add flags when relevant:
--requires-compliance
--requires-requirements
--citation-heavy
--citation-report <path>
--runtime-receipt <path>
--source-map <path>
--integrity-report <path>
--quality-gate <path>
--to-confirm "field or decision still unresolved"
Failure Behaviour
PASS: required evidence is present for the selected scope.
WARN: short-scope passport has missing or non-blocking evidence.
HOLD: full-scope or required evidence is missing.
If status is HOLD, do not call the artifact ready, client-ready, submission-ready, or publication-ready. Resolve the missing evidence, reduce the claim, or keep the artifact as a working draft.
Boundaries
- A passport does not prove that cited sources support claims.
- A passport does not upgrade metadata-only sources.
- A passport does not replace compliance, ethics/IRB, journal, funder, client, supervisor, peer-review, or institutional approval.
- Retrieval tools, Obsidian, Zotero, and external metadata searches remain support tools, not evidence authorities.