claude-latex-paper-skill

name

claude-latex-paper-skill

description

Write and revise a technical report or thesis as a LaTeX document in English, with the discipline a graded or peer-reviewed submission needs — every claim traced to an artifact, no citation from memory, human-sounding prose, and a mechanical verification loop. Use when the user asks to write the paper, technical report, thesis-style writeup, LaTeX report, 写论文, 技术报告, 排版, polish a section, add citations, or reduce AI-sounding prose.

LaTeX technical-report writing skill

Produce and maintain a LaTeX report or thesis in English, section by section, with a claim ledger, verified citations, human-sounding prose, and a mechanical check after every edit. Converse with the user in their language; write the report in English unless the user sets another target language.

Project metadata (collect once, then never re-ask)

At scaffold time, collect the report's fixed metadata from the user and record it — never invent it, and never re-ask it later. Typical fields for a title page and declaration:

Field	Example
Author	full name (or leave to the user's preference)
Institution	university / organisation
Faculty / department	as it should appear on the title page
Degree / programme	e.g. B.Sc. / M.Sc., or "not applicable"
Module / course / venue	module name and credits, or the target venue
Supervisor / advisor	name and title, if any
Deliverable	what is being submitted (report, software, presentation)

Confirm these once and treat them as fixed thereafter unless the user changes them.

Non-negotiable rules

1. Claim ledger. Every quantitative or comparative claim must trace to a project artifact (see references/evidence-map.md). No artifact → mark [CLAIM NEEDS EVIDENCE], never polish an unsupported claim.
2. Negative results stay. Honestly reported failures — a bug post-mortem, a result that did not hold up, a hypothesis that failed — are findings, not embarrassments. Report them with the same care as the positives.
3. No citation from memory. Follow references/citations.md: verify via DOI/CrossRef/ arXiv/Semantic Scholar before any BibTeX entry; unverifiable → explicit PLACEHOLDER_ key + tell the user.
4. Human-sounding English. Apply references/style.md while drafting, not as a post-pass. If a passage already reads naturally, leave it alone.
5. Compile before judging. Never assess layout from .tex source; build the PDF and look at it (references/latex.md).
6. Mechanical verification after every section. Run scripts/verify_paper.py and fix all hard failures before moving on — see references/verification.md. Trust the scan, not your impression of what you wrote.
7. Context hygiene. Long context is the main hallucination driver in long-document work: draft one section per sitting with only that section's evidence artifacts open; re-read the artifact before writing its numbers, never quote them from conversational memory. If drafting quality degrades or a session has grown long, hand off to a fresh session (/handoff).

Workflow

First invocation (no paper/ yet)

1. Read the project's source-of-truth artifacts — its results and data files, experiment logs, design and status notes, README. The report is written from these, not from memory of the conversation. Build the evidence map (references/evidence-map.md) from them.
2. Propose a section outline (see report skeleton in references/latex.md) and the evidence each section will draw on; get the user's verdict before drafting.
3. Scaffold paper/ (main.tex, sections/, refs.bib, a build script) and draft section by section, citing as you write.

Per-section loop (draft and revision alike)

1. Open only the evidence artifacts this section draws on; draft.
2. Run py -3.13 scripts/verify_paper.py paper/ (adjust the path to wherever the skill lives).
3. Fix hard failures (CJK leakage, unresolved markers, cite/bib mismatch), rerun until clean — two passes is normal; fixes can introduce new errors.
4. Compile, scan the log, eyeball changed pages.
5. Update paper/glossary.md with any new term-of-art before the next section (one term, one rendering — consistency beats variety).

Revision passes

• Section rewrite / polish → load references/style.md; state which section and what failure mode you are fixing.
• Citation work → load references/citations.md.
• Layout complaints (loose pages, split figures, floats) → load references/latex.md §Layout, skip the prose rules.
• After every edit batch: recompile, check the log for warnings, eyeball the changed pages.

Priority order when editing prose

Paper-type architecture → section's job → paragraph logic → claim/evidence/boundary → sentence polish. Fix the highest broken level first; a beautiful sentence in a paragraph with no argument is wasted work.

What NOT to do

• Do not invent related work, datasets, or numbers to fill gaps.
• Do not restructure into bullet-heavy "AI slide" prose; the report is flowing technical prose with tables/figures where the data lives.
• Do not commit anything; leave git operations to the user's verdict.
• Do not re-derive results by rerunning pipelines unless asked — the archived result files are canonical.