| name | paper-review |
| description | Use for review-only requests for papers or books when the user did not explicitly ask for annotation. Handles the normal single-agent review flow. |
| metadata | {"short-description":"Single-agent paper review workflow"} |
Paper Review
Use this skill for the normal single-agent review flow.
Trigger rule
Use this skill when the user asks for a review-only pass such as:
- review this paper
- critique this paper
- hard review
- find issues in this paper
- review and add to Zotero
Do not use this skill when the user explicitly asks for both annotation and review.
In that case, use annotated-review instead.
If the user explicitly asks for multiple agents, a panel, or a multi-agent review,
use agent-group-discuss instead of this skill.
Document lookup order for review tasks
If the user did not already provide a source path, attached file, PDF, or source tree:
- check
zotero
- if not found there, check
calibre
- only if neither library has the document, use an online path such as
getscipapers-requester
For review tasks, do not go online before checking both local libraries.
Document parsing preference
When you have the document as a local PDF, office file, HTML export, or image-backed scan, prefer docling for structure-aware parsing before relying on ad hoc plain-text extraction.
Use Docling especially when the review depends on:
- section hierarchy
- table extraction
- figure or picture detection
- reading order in complex layouts
- OCR on scanned pages
Writing Style Gate
Before writing review prose, load writing-style-settings.md and record the
active style profile for the review artifact. If the paper is a mathematical,
TCS, graph-theoretic, Lean, or LaTeX manuscript, also load
math-manuscript-style.md. Final review artifacts should record
style_profile_ref, active_overlays, active_requirement_ids, and
style_applied; do not treat a bare style_applied: true assertion as
evidence that the style policy was loaded.
Zotero rule
Zotero note storage is off by default for review-only requests.
- "Review this paper" -> review only, no Zotero write
- "Review and add to Zotero" -> do the review first, and only add/store in Zotero if the review workflow explicitly supports it and the user asked for it
Do not touch Zotero beyond lookup/retrieval unless the user explicitly asks.
Review expectations
- Keep the review single-agent by default.
- Focus on correctness, argument quality, clarity, missing assumptions, and important edge cases.
- When useful, use the imported
references/common_issues.md and references/reporting_standards.md as internal checklists.
- Summarize the main issues clearly, with evidence from the provided or retrieved document.
- If the document cannot be found in Zotero or Calibre, report that before attempting online retrieval.
- If you need a narrow internal checklist for proof auditing or single-reviewer critique, adapt
source-research/references/specialist-subagents.md without turning the task into a multi-agent run unless the user asked for one.
- For review-only requests, stop after the review. Do not annotate, store notes,
patch manuscripts, retrieve extra nonessential artifacts, or begin fixes
unless the user explicitly asks for those actions.
Recommended output format
Summary
- paper title, authors, venue/year when available
- overall assessment
- active writing-style profile and overlays, if the review is stored as an
artifact
Issues
For each issue:
- Severity: critical / major / minor / suggestion
- Type: logic / math / consistency / notation / presentation / missing / unsupported
- Location: page, section, line, or paragraph reference
- Quote: short supporting quote when helpful
- Description: what fails and why
Strengths
- key contributions
- what works well
Recommended actions
- prioritized fixes, highest severity first
Routing boundary
- review-only -> this skill
- annotate + review ->
annotated-review
- multi-agent review ->
agent-group-discuss
Recommended templates
When this skill is involved, consider these workflow templates (install via
the workflow-templates artifact profile, or --with-deps to pull backing skills):
cross-agent-adversarial-review -- Producer-never-confirmer adversarial review of a paper, proof, or code artifact across agent families with a fresh-agent confirmation gate.
