academic-paper-drafting-skill

name	academic-paper-drafting-skill
description	Draft or revise an academic paper from a reviewed evidence set with a coherent contribution story, explicit section contracts, and claim-evidence alignment.
allowed-tools	["read_file","list_dir","grep_search","glob_files","research_note","research_brief","artifact_write","write_file","edit_file"]

Academic paper drafting

Overview

Academic drafting turns a bounded research question, frozen claim ledger, and verified evidence into a paper whose novelty, reasoning, experiments, and limitations remain consistent from title through conclusion. It may reorganize or narrow claims, but it must not invent citations, results, methods, or experimental details.

When to Use

Use when outlining, drafting, or revising a paper or substantial paper section after the intended contribution and available evidence are known. Use the separate paper-review and citation-verification skills as release gates.

Workflow

1. Establish the paper contract: audience and venue constraints, research question, thesis, contribution list, evidence boundary, terminology map, required sections, and unresolved inputs. Stop if the central contribution cannot be stated without unsupported novelty or result claims.
2. Create a claim-evidence map. Link every material novelty, comparative, causal, numerical, and generalization claim to ledger evidence; label inference and planned-but-unavailable evidence. Narrow or remove claims that exceed their support.
3. Give each section a contract:
   • Abstract: problem, specific gap, contribution, strongest supported result, and scope.
   • Introduction: context, decision-relevant gap, contribution story, and paper map.
   • Related work: comparison dimensions and the precise distinction, without straw-manning.
   • Method: assumptions, inputs, mechanism, design rationale, and enough detail to inspect or reproduce.
   • Experiments: questions, baselines, datasets, metrics, controls, ablations, uncertainty, and threats to validity.
   • Conclusion: supported takeaway, boundary conditions, limitations, and bounded future work.
4. Draft around one contribution story. Keep terms, symbols, populations, baselines, metrics, and confidence language stable across prose, equations, captions, figures, and tables.
5. Treat each figure or table as an evidence-bearing artifact. Give it one message, readable labels and units, a self-contained caption, and an explicit callout from the prose. Never describe a result absent from the underlying data.
6. Reverse-outline the draft by recording each paragraph's single job and its dependency on the preceding paragraph. Split mixed-purpose paragraphs, repair unsupported transitions, and remove sections that do not advance the question or contribution.
7. Produce the draft together with its contribution list, terminology map, claim-evidence map, figure/table inventory, experiment coverage matrix, and explicit limitations. Preserve unresolved placeholders rather than filling them speculatively.

Verification

• The same bounded contribution story appears throughout the paper.
• Every material claim maps to evidence, inference, or an explicit gap.
• Every section and paragraph has one inspectable purpose.
• Terminology, symbols, metrics, and scope remain consistent.
• Figures, tables, experiments, and limitations support the stated claims.

Red Flags

• Declaring novelty from absence of a remembered citation.
• Writing an abstract result that the experiment section does not establish.
• Treating visual polish as evidence quality.
• Hiding a technical defect as vague future work.
• Filling missing values, citations, or method details with plausible text.