| name | evidence-not-assertion |
| description | Use whenever a number, a comparison or a claim is about to enter a stage summary or the report — at analysis and writing, and any time you are tempted to state a value you have not computed in this run. Covers where a number must come from, what to do when the experiment did not run, and why an honest gap outscores a plausible sentence. |
Every number comes from a file this run wrote
A reader who cannot trace a number to an artifact has to decide whether to trust
it, and a strict one decides no. That is not a style preference: a value you
recall from the literature, infer from a trend, or round from memory is
indistinguishable in the prose from one you measured, and the moment a single
number turns out to be invented the whole report is worth nothing.
So, for every quantity that reaches the report:
- It was produced by code in
code/ and written to a file under outputs/ or
results/ during this run. Name that file next to the number.
- If it comes from the literature, say so in the same sentence, with the source.
"The published value is X (Smith 2023); we measure Y" is a result. "The value
is X" where X came from a paper is a fabrication with a citation missing.
- If you have not run the experiment, do not describe what it would have shown.
Write what you did run and what remains unmeasured.
When the experiment did not run
State it plainly, in one sentence, in the section where the result would have
gone: what was not run, why, and what would settle it. Do not bury it in a
limitations paragraph at the end, and do not substitute a proxy analysis without
saying that is what you are doing.
An honest "we did not measure this" costs you that one result. A plausible
sentence with no measurement behind it, once found, costs you the reader's
belief in the results you did measure — including the good ones.
The self-check before writing
Take the three numbers your abstract leads with. For each, open the file it came
from. If you cannot, it does not go in the abstract.
