Prepare Journal Manuscripts

Carry one evidence-linked article through the journal lifecycle. Resolve the exact journal, article type, stage, and authority; freeze the scientific contract; choose one mode; and reconcile every editor-facing and reviewer-facing artifact before delivery.

Select one mode

Mode	Responsibility	Read first
recon	Refresh journal, article-type, policy, format, reporting, data, code, image, and disclosure requirements	references/journal-lifecycle.md
draft	Draft sections from an author-approved outline and locked scientific contract	references/drafting-and-polish.md
audit	Challenge claims, reporting, novelty, policy compliance, and cross-artifact consistency without editing	references/adversarial-audit.md
polish	Make targeted evidence-preserving edits and repair narrative structure	references/drafting-and-polish.md
editor-pack	Assemble title page, manuscript, figures, declarations, checklists, and editor-facing metadata	references/editor-pack-and-cover-letter.md
cover-letter	Draft or audit a factual journal-specific cover letter	references/editor-pack-and-cover-letter.md
revision-response	Build a complete point-by-point response and synchronized clean and marked manuscripts	references/revision-response.md
final-package	Verify accepted-paper source, rendering, declarations, availability statements, and files under current production instructions	references/journal-lifecycle.md

Use one primary mode per pass. Run recon when the exact journal, article type, stage, or official authority is uncertain. A publisher-wide page or remembered convention cannot replace the target journal's current first-party instructions.

Resolve the installed skill and components

Resolve SKILL_DIR as the directory containing this SKILL.md. Every runtime component is below that directory; never resolve through the package parent. Read only the component needed for the current task:

Need	Component
abstract drafting, compression, or audit	components/abstract/guide.md
statistical and evaluation reporting	components/statistics-reporting/guide.md
data inventory, access routes, and statement	components/data-availability/guide.md
code inventory, versions, licences, and statement	components/code-availability/guide.md

The bundled validators check local completeness and consistency. They do not establish scientific truth, repository access, consent, licence rights, or journal acceptance.

Lock the scientific contract before prose

Obtain the article's question, contribution, methods, data, split, comparators, independent units, endpoints, statistical design, results, uncertainty, limitations, and exact source artifacts. This is the locked scientific contract. Manuscript work may explain or narrow it, but cannot invent a result, redesign an analysis, choose a favorable subset, strengthen causality, or convert future work into completed evidence.

Map title, abstract, main claims, figures, tables, discussion, and conclusion to exact support. Distinguish observed result, author interpretation, and broader implication. Keep critical definitions, controls, denominators, exclusions, and limitations visible in the main article when the journal expects the paper to stand on its own.

For draft and polish, use the paragraph and reverse-outline workflow in references/drafting-and-polish.md. Preserve every number, unit, direction, interval, qualifier, and citation scope. Use the abstract component only after the central claim and evidence boundary are stable. Statistical design is upstream research scope; the reporting component checks and expresses the frozen analysis.

For single-section or section-by-section polish, or "continue the next section" / "继续下一节", read section polish and continuation. Keep one manuscript/candidate and the authorized section queue in the existing project checkpoint; verify each changed section before accepting it. Continue through the whole queue when already authorized, then perform one closing cross-section check. Section completion alone is not full-article or editor-package completion.

For Nature-family full-paper or section work, read the relevant sections of section-specific writing: title, abstract, Introduction, Results, Methods, Discussion, legends and supplementary text. A full-paper request requires coverage of every supplied section; report missing sections explicitly.

When the task explicitly asks to calibrate an Article against published Nature-family examples, also read references/nature-family-article-shapes.md. Its DOI and PDF-page locators document a bounded exemplar corpus. They are empirical precedents, not current journal policy or a fixed manuscript template.

For Nature-family draft or polish tasks involving paragraph flow, comparison prose, or legends, read paragraph and legend lessons. Use the located examples to preserve comparison regimes, meaningful transitions and panel-specific sampling; adapt the writing to the current evidence.

Build editor and review packages as linked artifacts

For editor-pack and cover-letter, inventory every required item before writing. Describe fit, contribution, related submissions, prior dissemination, authorship, ethics, competing interests, data and code status, and suggested or opposed reviewers only from confirmed facts. Do not claim novelty, exclusivity, repository availability, or author agreement without evidence.

For revision-response, read references/revision-response.md. Account for every editor and reviewer comment. Link each answer to evidence and an exact change location. The response letter, clean manuscript, marked manuscript, figures, supplement, and availability statements must describe the same revision. A promised analysis remains future work until its outputs have been inspected.

Resolve data, code, figures, and policy

For a data availability task, inventory every dataset supporting main and supplementary claims before drafting the statement. Never invent an accession, DOI, licence, restriction, controller, access procedure, embargo, or deposit state. Actual public release and repository mutation require separate external-action authorization; this skill independently owns statement accuracy and manuscript-package consistency.

Complete authorized figure construction and visual QA using the bundled standalone figures route. Verify the target journal's current policies for image manipulation, generated images, source data, code, reporting checklists, AI use, ethics, and disclosure. Do not treat a publisher-family convention as universal.

For new or redesigned schematics, including panels in main, Extended Data and Supplementary figures, default to GPT Image 2.5 concept, then native editable PPTX using available image and presentation tools directly, then produce journal-required exports. Measured plots and real images remain source-derived. The optional build-scientific-visualizations skill enhances this same route with dense compound layouts. Its absence does not limit delivery to a figure brief. Read-only audits do not authorize new drawing or modification of an approved figure.

Audit and deliver

Apply references/adversarial-audit.md to the exact candidate files. Inspect rendered pages at normal reading scale, not only source. Reconcile the title page, anonymous or identified manuscript, figures, tables, legends, supplement, declarations, cover letter, response, marked copy, data statement, and code statement as applicable.

Report observed findings separately from inference, not_run, and failed checks. Give each defect the smallest valid action and a settling check. Preserve the last accepted or author-approved baseline before revision. Uploading, changing repository records, contacting an editor, or submitting is an external action requiring explicit author authorization.

Independent completion and optional specialists

This skill owns journal prose, editor-facing materials, peer-review revision, current journal compliance, manuscript-context figures and final local packaging. It requires no other skill to complete that scope. New research design, experiments, frozen evaluation and actual publication remain separately authorized research or external actions; optional specialist skills do not change those boundaries.