Guides self-review of YOUR OWN academic paper before submission with adversarial stress-testing. Core method: 5-aspect checklist (contribution sufficiency, writing clarity, results quality, testing completeness, method design), counterintuitive protocol (reject-first simulation, delete unsupported claims, score trust, promote limitations, attack novelty), reverse-outlining, and figure/table quality checks. Use when: user wants to self-review or self-check their own paper draft before submission, stress-test their claims, prepare for reviewer criticism, or mentions 'self-review', 'check my draft', 'is my paper ready'. Do NOT use for writing a peer review of someone else's paper, and do NOT use after receiving actual reviews (use paper-rebuttal instead).
A systematic approach to self-reviewing academic papers before submission. Covers a 5-aspect review checklist, reverse-outlining for structural clarity, figure/table quality checks, and rebuttal preparation.
If the user has already received reviewer comments and needs to write a rebuttal, use the
paper-rebuttalskill instead.
Before starting review, confirm the paper-writing handoff checklist is satisfied: all sections drafted, claims anchored to evidence, limitation section present, figures finalized, and no unresolved \todo{} markers. If any item is incomplete, finish writing before reviewing.
Strive for perfection: review your own paper, consider every question a reviewer might ask, and address them one by one.
The best defense against negative reviews is a thorough self-review:
Run this protocol before final polishing:
The paper does not provide readers with new knowledge.
Ask these questions to evaluate whether the contribution is sufficient:
Red flag: If "yes" to any of these, strengthen the contribution narrative or add more technical depth.
Missing technical details, not reproducible; a method module lacks motivation.
Red flag: If reproducibility is in doubt, add implementation details or supplementary material.
Only slightly better than previous methods; or better than previous methods but still not good enough.
Red flag: If improvements are marginal, emphasize other advantages (speed, generalizability, simplicity) or add more challenging test cases.
Missing ablation studies; missing important baselines; missing important evaluation metrics; data too simple.
Red flag: Missing ablations or baselines is one of the most common reasons for rejection.
Experimental setting is impractical; method has technical flaws; method is not robust; new method's costs outweigh its benefits.
Red flag: If the method requires significant tuning per scenario, add robustness experiments or acknowledge and address the limitation.
Every claim in the paper (especially in the Abstract and Introduction) must be correct and supported by experiments. Some reviewers will reject a paper directly for unsupported claims.
Go through every claim in the Abstract and Introduction. For each claim:
An unsupported claim — especially in the Abstract or Introduction — can be grounds for rejection.
Extract the writing plan from finished paragraphs and check whether the flow is smooth.
After writing a section (or the entire paper):
Apply this to:
\toprule, \midrule, \bottomrule)Rule: "If our method does not fall below SOTA metrics, it is not a technical defect"
When reviews come back, use the paper-rebuttal skill for:
Your self-review artifacts (reject-first simulation, claim-evidence audit, prebuttal drafts from the counterintuitive protocol) feed directly into the rebuttal process.
See references/review-checklist.md for an expanded version of the 5-aspect checklist with more detailed sub-questions.
For adversarial stress testing and reject-risk thresholds, see references/counterintuitive-review.md.