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/neuroflow:paper

Draft and internally review every section of your manuscript — nothing is saved without critic approval.

/paper is the unified manuscript command. It replaces two separate steps (draft, then review) with a single brutal loop: the paper-writer agent drafts each section, the paper-critic agent applies the full six-area peer-review methodology, and the loop iterates up to 3 times per section. Only approved sections reach disk.

When to use it

  • After /data-analyze — results and figures are ready
  • You want to produce a manuscript that has been through rigorous internal review before it reaches a real journal
  • You want drafting and critique in one integrated workflow with automatic critic approval gates

What it does

Claude reads your project memory and asks:

  1. Target journal?
  2. Format? LaTeX or Markdown/Word
  3. Which section(s)? — or full paper
  4. Review focus? — full six-area critique on every section, or specific areas

The write→critique loop

Every section goes through this loop before it is saved:

paper-writer → draft v1
paper-critic → [STATUS: APPROVED] or [STATUS: REJECTED] + actionable feedback

if APPROVED → section saved to manuscript/
if REJECTED → paper-writer revises → draft v2
              paper-critic → verdict

if APPROVED → section saved
if REJECTED → paper-writer revises → draft v3
              paper-critic → verdict

if APPROVED → section saved
if REJECTED (3rd) → loop halts; unresolved critique logged to .neuroflow/paper/critic-log.md
                    user decides whether to accept the draft or stop

Maximum 3 iterations per section. Nothing is written to manuscript/ without [STATUS: APPROVED] or explicit user acceptance.

Critic standards

The paper-critic agent applies the full neuroflow:review-neuro six-area methodology to every draft:

Area What is checked
Language & Terminology Spelling, grammar, neuroscience terminology errors, causality language
Internal Consistency Figure/table references, value consistency across sections
Claim Support & Causality Overclaims, causality creep, FC over-interpretation
Statistics Effect sizes, multiple-comparison correction, null models, estimator specification
Methods Reproducibility COBIDAS/ARRIVE compliance, artefact thresholds, data/code availability
Contribution & Novelty Novelty claims, prior work comparison, journal fit

A section is approved only if it would survive peer review at a top-tier neuroscience journal. The bar is not "acceptable draft" — it is "ready for submission".

Drafting order

For a full paper, sections are drafted in this order:

Order Section Source material
1 Methods .neuroflow/experiment/, .neuroflow/data-preprocess/, .neuroflow/data-analyze/
2 Results .neuroflow/data-analyze/ (analysis outputs, figures)
3 Introduction .neuroflow/ideation/ (research question, literature)
4 Discussion All prior sections plus interpretation
5 Abstract Always last — summarises after all other sections are approved

Output

Approved sections are saved to manuscript/ (or the path set in .neuroflow/paper/flow.md). Loop state is tracked in .neuroflow/paper/critic-log.md.

Files read and written

Direction Files
Reads .neuroflow/project_config.md, .neuroflow/flow.md, .neuroflow/ideation/flow.md, .neuroflow/data-analyze/flow.md, .neuroflow/paper/flow.md
Writes .neuroflow/paper/, .neuroflow/paper/flow.md, .neuroflow/paper/critic-log.md, .neuroflow/sessions/YYYY-MM-DD.md, manuscript/ (approved drafts)
  • /data-analyze — generate the results that go into the paper
  • /review — peer review a colleague's paper using the same six-area methodology