/manuscript-review

name: manuscript-review
description: 'Pre-publication manuscript audit producing a section-level refactoring report with citation hygiene and submission-readiness checks. Triggers on: "review my paper", "check before submission", "is this ready to submit", "pre-pub checklist", "refactor my paper", "check my references", "does the abstract work".'
metadata:
  version: 1.3.0
  complements:
    [
      manuscript-provenance,
      manuscript-typography,
      figure-rhetoric,
      figure-table-quality,
      citation-audit,
      arxiv-preflight,
    ]
  category: review
  tags: [manuscript, pre-publication, citation-hygiene, submission]
  difficulty: advanced
  phase: review

Manuscript Review Skill

**Pipeline position:** Phase 1a (content audit). Runs in parallel with `figure-rhetoric`. No prior dependencies. Outputs consumed by `manuscript-provenance` (macro manifest feedback) and `figure-rhetoric` (claims map for visual argument assessment). See companion skills for full pre-publication coverage: `manuscript-typography` (typographic conventions), `citation-audit` (citation truth), `arxiv-preflight` (submission compliance).

Purpose

Execute a comprehensive, multi-pass diagnostic audit of an academic or technical manuscript, producing a structured improvement report that identifies issues across 24 audit dimensions — from macro-coherence and argumentative architecture through claims-evidence calibration, narrative flow, prose microstructure, rendered visual inspection, and cross-element coherence, down to citation hygiene and reproducibility.

The output is a prioritized, actionable improvement plan — not a line edit. The goal is to surface structural, logical, and clarity issues that authors systematically miss because they're too close to the text.

Optimized for arXiv/preprint submissions with flexible compliance standards.

Companion skill: `manuscript-provenance` audits whether manuscript content (numbers, tables, figures, ordering, terminology) is computationally derived from code and scripts. This skill audits the document as prose; that skill audits computational grounding. Run both for complete pre-publication coverage.

Boundary Agreement with manuscript-provenance

| Concern | This skill (manuscript-review) | manuscript-provenance | | ------------------------- | ----------------------------------------------------------- | -------------------------------------------------------------- | | Reproducibility | Does the paper describe enough to reproduce? (§6) | Does the code actually produce what the paper claims? (§1, §7) | | Figures/Tables | Legible, accessible, well-formatted? (§12) | Generated by scripts, not manual entry? (§2, §3) | | Rendered visuals | Readable at print scale? Floats near references? (§23) | Figure generation script produces correct format? (§3) | | Hyperparameters | Listed in the paper with rationale? (§6) | Values trace to config files, not hardcoded? (§1, §8) | | Code availability | Statement exists in the paper? (§17) | Repo URL valid, README accurate, pipeline works? (§11) | | Terminology | Abbreviations consistent within document? (§14) | Terms match code identifiers? (§5) | | Significant figures | Consistent precision within document? (§12) | Precision matches script output? (§2) | | Figure format | Appropriate format for document quality? (§12) | Format generated by script, not manually exported? (§3) | | Computational cost | Reported in the paper? (§7) | Values trace to benchmarking scripts? (§1) | | Macro-prose coherence | Prose framing appropriate for injected value? (§24) | Value traced to code, macro manifest produced? (§4) | | Cross-element consistency | Prose, captions, figures, tables mutually consistent? (§24) | All elements from same run/pipeline output? (§9) |

**Rule:** This skill never opens the codebase. manuscript-provenance never judges prose quality. Each reads the other's report when available.

**Integration point — Macro Manifest:** manuscript-provenance produces a **macro manifest** as part of its §4 audit: a structured list of every macro-injected value, its resolved numeric value, its source (script + output file), and its location(s) in the manuscript text. This skill's Pass 13 (Cross-Element Coherence) consumes that manifest to check whether the prose surrounding each injected value is appropriate for the actual value. If no provenance report exists, this skill extracts macro values directly from `.tex` source (less precise — no source tracing, but coherence check still runs).

Workflow

1. Ingest

Read the uploaded manuscript. Accept PDF, DOCX, LaTeX source, or Markdown. If multiple files are uploaded (e.g., main text + supplementary), process all of them.

Identify:

• Target venue (defaults to arXiv/preprint; adjust if conference/journal submission)
• Submission type (full paper, technical report, thesis chapter, etc.)
• Any specific concerns the user raised — these get priority in the report

For arXiv submissions, compliance checks are advisory. Focus on technical quality, reproducibility, and clarity rather than strict formatting rules.

2. Load the Checklist

Read `references/checklist.md` — the comprehensive 24-section, ~175-checkpoint refactoring checklist. Every audit pass is structured against this checklist.

Read references/checklist.md

3. Multi-Pass Audit

Execute the following passes sequentially. Each pass maps to one or more checklist sections. Work systematically — for each checkpoint:

• **PAS