paper-review - SKILL.md Agent Skill

name: paper-review description: Use for review-only requests for papers or books when the user did not explicitly ask for annotation. Handles the normal single-agent review flow. metadata: short-description: Single-agent paper review workflow

Paper Review

Use this skill for the normal single-agent review flow.

Trigger rule

Use this skill when the user asks for a review-only pass such as:

review this paper
critique this paper
hard review
find issues in this paper
review and add to Zotero

Do not use this skill when the user explicitly asks for both annotation and review. In that case, use annotated-review instead.

If the user explicitly asks for multiple agents, a panel, or a multi-agent review, use agent-group-discuss instead of this skill.

Document lookup order for review tasks

If the user did not already provide a source path, attached file, PDF, or source tree:

check zotero
if not found there, check calibre
only if neither library has the document, use an online path such as getscipapers-requester

For review tasks, do not go online before checking both local libraries.

Document parsing preference

When you have the document as a local PDF, office file, HTML export, or image-backed scan, prefer docling for structure-aware parsing before relying on ad hoc plain-text extraction.

Use Docling especially when the review depends on:

section hierarchy
table extraction
figure or picture detection
reading order in complex layouts
OCR on scanned pages

Writing Style Gate

Before writing review prose, load writing-style-settings.md and record the active style profile for the review artifact. If the paper is a mathematical, TCS, graph-theoretic, Lean, or LaTeX manuscript, also load math-manuscript-style.md. Final review artifacts should record style_profile_ref, active_overlays, active_requirement_ids, and style_applied; do not treat a bare style_applied: true assertion as evidence that the style policy was loaded.

Zotero rule

Zotero note storage is off by default for review-only requests.

"Review this paper" -> review only, no Zotero write
"Review and add to Zotero" -> do the review first, and only add/store in Zotero if the review workflow explicitly supports it and the user asked for it

Do not touch Zotero beyond lookup/retrieval unless the user explicitly asks.

Review expectations

Keep the review single-agent by default.
Focus on correctness, argument quality, clarity, missing assumptions, and important edge cases.
When useful, use the imported references/common_issues.md and references/reporting_standards.md as internal checklists.
Summarize the main issues clearly, with evidence from the provided or retrieved document.
If the document cannot be found in Zotero or Calibre, report that before attempting online retrieval.
If you need a narrow internal checklist for proof auditing or single-reviewer critique, adapt source-research/references/specialist-subagents.md without turning the task into a multi-agent run unless the user asked for one.
For review-only requests, stop after the review. Do not annotate, store notes, patch manuscripts, retrieve extra nonessential artifacts, or begin fixes unless the user explicitly asks for those actions.

Recommended output format

Summary

paper title, authors, venue/year when available
overall assessment
active writing-style profile and overlays, if the review is stored as an artifact

Issues

For each issue:

Severity: critical / major / minor / suggestion
Type: logic / math / consistency / notation / presentation / missing / unsupported
Location: page, section, line, or paragraph reference
Quote: short supporting quote when helpful
Description: what fails and why

Strengths

key contributions
what works well

Recommended actions

prioritized fixes, highest severity first

Routing boundary

review-only -> this skill
annotate + review -> annotated-review
multi-agent review -> agent-group-discuss

Recommended templates

When this skill is involved, consider these workflow templates (install via the workflow-templates artifact profile, or --with-deps to pull backing skills):

cross-agent-adversarial-review -- Producer-never-confirmer adversarial review of a paper, proof, or code artifact across agent families with a fresh-agent confirmation gate.