/academic-paper-review

name: academic-paper-review
description: Use this skill when the user requests to review, analyze, critique, or summarize academic papers, research articles, preprints, or scientific publications. Supports comprehensive structured reviews covering methodology assessment, contribution evaluation, literature positioning, and constructive feedback generation. Trigger on queries involving paper URLs, uploaded PDFs, arXiv links, or requests like "review this paper", "analyze this research", "summarize this study", or "write a peer review".

Academic Paper Review Skill

Overview

This skill produces structured, peer-review-quality analyses of academic papers and research publications. It follows established academic review standards used by top-tier venues (NeurIPS, ICML, ACL, Nature, IEEE) to provide rigorous, constructive, and balanced assessments.

The review covers **summary, strengths, weaknesses, methodology assessment, contribution evaluation, literature positioning, and actionable recommendations** — all grounded in evidence from the paper itself.

Core Capabilities

• Parse and comprehend academic papers from uploaded PDFs or fetched URLs
• Generate structured reviews following top-venue review templates
• Assess methodology rigor (experimental design, statistical validity, reproducibility)
• Evaluate novelty and significance of contributions
• Position the work within the broader research landscape via targeted literature search
• Identify limitations, gaps, and potential improvements
• Produce both detailed review and concise executive summary formats
• Support papers in any scientific domain (CS, biology, physics, social sciences, etc.)

When to Use This Skill

**Always load this skill when:**

• User provides a paper URL (arXiv, DOI, conference proceedings, journal link)
• User uploads a PDF of a research paper or preprint
• User asks to "review", "analyze", "critique", "assess", or "summarize" a research paper
• User wants to understand the strengths and weaknesses of a study
• User requests a peer-review-style evaluation of academic work
• User asks for help preparing a review for a conference or journal submission

Review Methodology

Phase 1: Paper Comprehension

Thoroughly read and understand the paper before forming any judgments.

Step 1.1: Identify Paper Metadata

Extract and record:

| Field | Description | |-------|-------------| | **Title** | Full paper title | | **Authors** | Author list and affiliations | | **Venue / Status** | Publication venue, preprint server, or submission status | | **Year** | Publication or submission year | | **Domain** | Research field and subfield | | **Paper Type** | Empirical, theoretical, survey, position paper, systems paper, etc. |

Step 1.2: Deep Reading Pass

Read the paper systematically:

1. **Abstract & Introduction** — Identify the claimed contributions and motivation 2. **Related Work** — Note how authors position their work relative to prior art 3. **Methodology** — Understand the proposed approach, model, or framework in detail 4. **Experiments / Results** — Examine datasets, baselines, metrics, and reported outcomes 5. **Discussion & Limitations** — Note any self-identified limitations 6. **Conclusion** — Compare concluded claims against actual evidence presented

Step 1.3: Key Claims Extraction

List the paper's main claims explicitly:

Claim 1: [Specific claim about contribution or finding]
Evidence: [What evidence supports this claim in the paper]
Strength: [Strong / Moderate / Weak]

Claim 2: [...]
...

Phase 2: Critical Analysis

Step 2.1: Literature Context Search

Use web search to understand the research landscape:

Search queries:
- "[paper topic] state of the art [current year]"
- "[key method name] comparison benchmark"
- "[authors] previous work [topic]"
- "[specific technique] limitations criticism"
- "survey [research area] recent advances"

Use `web_fetch` on key related papers or surveys to understand where this work fits.

Step 2.2: Methodology Assessment

Evaluate the methodology using the following framework:

| Criterion | Questions to Ask | Rating | |-----------|-----------------|--------| | **Soundness** | Is the approach technically correct? Are there logical flaws? | 1-5 | | **Novelty** | What is genuinely new vs. incremental improvement? | 1-5 | | **Reproducibility** | Are details sufficient to reproduce? Code/data available? | 1-5 | | **Experimental Design** | Are baselines fair? Are ablations adequate? Are datasets appropriate? | 1-5 | | **Statistical Rigor** | Are results statistically significant? Error bars reported? Multiple runs? | 1-5 | | **Scalability** | Does the approach scale? Are computational costs discussed? | 1-5 |

Step 2.3: Contribution Significance Assessment

Evaluate the significance level:

| Level | Description | Criteria | |-------|-------------|----------| | **Landmark** | Fundamentally changes the field | New paradigm, widely applicable breakthrough | | **Significant** | Strong contribution advancing the state of the art | Clear improvement with solid evidence | | **Moderate** | Useful contribution with some limitations | Incremental but valid improvement | | **Marginal** | Minimal advance over existing work | Small gains, narrow applicability | | **Below threshold** | Does not meet publication standards | Fundamental flaws, insufficient evidence |

Step 2.4: Strengths and Weaknesses Analysis

For each strength or weakness, provide:

• **What**: Specific observation
• **Where**: Section/figure/table reference
• **Why it matters**: Impact on the paper's claims or utility

Phase 3: Review Synthesis

Step 3.1: Assemble the Structured Review

Produce the final review using the template below.

Review Output Template

# Paper Review: [Paper Title]

## Paper Metadata
- **Authors**: [Author list]
- **Venue**: [Publication venue or preprint server]
- **Year**: [Year]
- **Domain**: [R