| name | academic-baseline |
| description | Use when working on any empirical academic research context — paper writing, data analysis, literature review, or any task involving citations, results, or publication artifacts. Establishes non-negotiable principles that govern all other superpapers skills. |
Academic Baseline
Overview
This skill is the constitution of the superpapers plugin. It sets inviolable rules that every other skill must respect. Load it early in any research session — the principles below apply regardless of which domain skill is active.
When to Use
- Starting a new research project
- Analyzing data or running models
- Writing any section of a paper
- Reviewing results before a submission
- Preparing final artifacts for a journal
- Any conversation mentioning papers, journals, citations, regressions, datasets, or results
Core Principles
The nine principles below are non-negotiable. Every other superpapers skill operates under them.
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Never fabricate citations. Every reference must have a DOI or verifiable URL confirmed via web fetch. Citing from memory is forbidden. If a source cannot be verified, mark it as [unverified] explicitly and exclude it from the final bibliography.
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Replication is mandatory. No number, table, or figure enters the paper without a script that regenerates it from raw data with a fixed seed. Manual copying of results into the paper is forbidden. See replication-driven-research for the full discipline.
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LaTeX is the default output format. Tables use booktabs and threeparttable. Figures are vector PDFs. Papers are .tex documents, not Word documents, unless the target journal explicitly requires otherwise.
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Distinguish causal from correlational claims. Causal language (effect, impact, causes) requires an explicit identification strategy. When in doubt, use correlational language (associated with, correlated with, related to). Wrong framing is a substantive error, not a stylistic one.
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YAGNI applies to robustness. Include canonical robustness checks for the chosen design. Do not pile on thirty tests to impress referees — noise is not evidence. See robustness-checks for the selection criterion.
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Exploratory is not confirmatory. If a result was found by exploring the data, declare it as exploratory. Do not retroactively frame it as a prior hypothesis. HARKing (hypothesizing after results are known) corrupts inference and is forbidden.
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Numerical integrity is non-negotiable. Fix the random seed in every script that uses randomness. Document package versions in a lockfile. Never hardcode intermediate results in the paper. Different runs on the same data and code must produce identical numbers.
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Respect the user's paper language. Plugin internals and code are English-only. Paper content — abstracts, sections, table notes, figure captions, generated text — follows the user's chosen paper language, read from CLAUDE.superpapers.md when present or obtained from explicit user instruction otherwise. Never mix plugin language into user output.
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Write clean, flowing prose. Avoid excessive subsections — use them only when a genuine structural break exists, not to label every paragraph. Avoid overusing parenthetical remarks and em-dashes to inject qualifications or explanations mid-sentence; if the information matters, give it its own sentence. Parentheses and dashes should be rare punctuation, not a writing habit. Academic prose should read as a continuous argument, not a nested outline. See paper-writing for the full prose discipline (section formulas, style rules, AI-pattern avoidance, review rubric).
Mandatory Steps
- Resolve
CLAUDE.superpapers.md by attempting to Read it from the current working directory. If the file does not exist there, walk upward through parent directories (../CLAUDE.superpapers.md, ../../CLAUDE.superpapers.md, and so on) until found or until the filesystem root is reached. If found, apply its settings (field, paper language, significance convention, seed, target journals, any user-authored rules) throughout the session. If not found in the walk, proceed without blocking and ask the user inline when a specific setting is first needed.
- Apply the nine principles above to every recommendation and action. They take precedence over any domain skill's local conventions when in conflict.
- Flag principle violations explicitly when working with the user. Do not proceed silently when a requested action conflicts with a principle.
- When a user asks for something that violates a principle, state the conflict plainly, propose a compliant alternative, and wait for the user to decide. Do not refuse without proposing a path forward.
Anti-Patterns
- Generating a citation without verifying DOI or URL
- Writing a number into the paper without a script that regenerates it
- Using causal language ("X causes Y", "the effect of X") for a design without identification
- Adding robustness checks beyond the canonical set "just in case"
- Running analysis scripts with a different seed between runs
- Framing an exploratory finding as if it were a prior hypothesis
- Ignoring the paper language setting and producing user-facing text in English when the paper is in another language
- Proceeding silently with an action that violates a principle
- Fragmenting a section into many subsections when the content flows naturally as paragraphs
- Relying on parentheses or dashes as a crutch to pack qualifications into sentences instead of writing them out
Verification Before Completion
