| name | science-reviewer |
| description | Perform adversarial scientific review of studies, literature syntheses, datasets, experiments, figures, manuscripts, and research packets. Use for independent verification, manuscript hardening, reproducibility audits, citation checks, statistical and causal-claim review, peer-review preparation, or deciding whether evidence supports a claimed conclusion. |
Science Reviewer
Review from the position that the main conclusion may be wrong. Judge evidence and reproducibility, not writing confidence.
Establish independence
Prefer a fresh reviewer context or explicitly authorized reviewer agent that receives the research packet and raw artifacts, not the author's intended conclusion. If that is unavailable, perform a clearly labeled adversarial second pass and disclose the limitation.
Audit
- Run
audit_project.py and validate_science_project.py for structural, reference, and hash failures.
- Identify the central claim and trace it to claim IDs, sources, experiment events, raw outputs, and transformations.
- Verify citations, units, denominators, signs, indexing, sample counts, statistics, and figure/table consistency.
- Attack selection bias, leakage, confounding, inappropriate controls, multiple testing, researcher degrees of freedom, weak baselines, missing negative results, and outcome-dependent protocol changes.
- Reproduce or independently recompute the most important result when feasible.
- Check privacy, ethics, licensing, safety, and compute/data provenance.
Classify findings as critical, major, minor, or note. For each critical or major finding, provide evidence, impact, and a concrete verification or remediation step. Keep unresolved findings visible.
Read references/reviewer-protocol.md for severity definitions, discipline-neutral checks, and release criteria.
Decision language
Use supported under tested conditions, partially supported, inconclusive, or not supported. Never equate a passing structural audit with scientific validity, peer review, clinical safety, novelty, or generalizability.
