read-prior

name	read-prior
description	Web-search validation of citation and novelty claims from check_claim.json. Checks whether cited facts are accurate and novelty claims ("first", "pioneering") hold against published literature.
author	PaperDoctor Research
license	MIT
tags	["Reference","Novelty","Citation-Check","WebSearch"]
dependencies	["read-txt"]
argument-hint	["paper_dir"]
user-invocable	true
allowed-tools	Read, WebSearch, WebFetch

Citation & Novelty Validation

Validate claims from check_claim.json that require external evidence.

Prerequisites

• {paper_dir}/reports/check_claim.json

Workflow

- [ ] Step 1: Load target claims
- [ ] Step 2: Search and judge each claim
- [ ] Step 3: Save report

---

Step 1: Load Target Claims

Read {paper_dir}/reports/check_claim.json. Collect all claims where evidence_type includes "related_work".

Each claim's id, source, quote, claim, evidence_type fields should be copied as-is into the output — do not modify them.

These cover three sub-types — use the quote and claim text to identify which:

• Baseline comparison — compares against another method ("outperforms X by Y%")
• Cited fact — characterizes or cites another paper ("X achieves Y on benchmark Z")
• Novelty assertion — claims priority over prior work ("first", "pioneering", "no prior work has")

---

Step 2: Search and Judge

For each claim, run WebSearch queries. When a relevant paper is found, fetch its full page (arXiv abstract or PDF landing page) and look for specific supporting details — e.g., which table reports the result, which section describes the method, what numbers are shown. Include these details in reason (e.g., "Table 2 in [paper] reports X% on [benchmark] under the same setting").

Assign a status:

Status	Meaning
pass	Web evidence confirms the claim
warning	Claim is imprecise, overstated, or has a missing citation
error	Claim is factually wrong or clear prior art exists
unverifiable	Insufficient web evidence

For novelty claims, also note if the novelty is novel, incremental, or prior_art_exists.

When status is warning or error, include a suggest field with a one-sentence concrete fix (e.g., "Relabel as incremental and cite Chen et al. 2021").

---

Step 3: Save Report

Output: {paper_dir}/reports/check_prior.json

{
  "summary": {
    "total": 5,
    "pass": 3,
    "warning": 1,
    "error": 0,
    "unverifiable": 1
  },
  "results": [
    {
      "id": 12,
      "source": "introduction",
      "quote": "We are the first to apply mutual information maximization to knowledge distillation",
      "claim": "No prior work has used mutual information for knowledge distillation",
      "evidence_type": ["related_work"],
      "status": "warning",
      "reason": "Chen et al. (2021) proposed MI-based distillation for NLP; this paper's novelty is limited to the vision domain",
      "suggest": "Relabel the novelty as `incremental`, restrict the claim to the vision domain, and cite Chen et al. (2021)."
    }
  ]
}

Coverage Rule

Every claim with related_work in evidence_type MUST appear in results. No claim may be silently skipped. If a claim's cited fact checks out quickly, still include it with status: "pass" and the source.

Tips

• Max 3 searches per claim — stop early if confident
• Do not penalize for missing citations published after the paper's submission date
• Do not fabricate URLs — only include URLs returned by WebSearch