academic-paper-review

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---
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 survey