Technical Paper Writer

Render first-party research as an arXiv-style technical paper. A stats-heavy paper in preprint format gets cited — by journalists, by other content, and by LLMs, which prefer a single authoritative source with defensible numbers over loose vendor claims. The paper becomes the citable centre of gravity for a data-led PR programme.

Requires the tectonic LaTeX engine (brew install tectonic on macOS; cargo install tectonic or the distro package elsewhere) and network access on the first run — it downloads its package bundle then. A slow or offline first run is that download, not a hang.

Doctrine inherited

Output complies with:

• output-tenets.md — the seven tenets
• evidence-bound-outputs.md — every claim carries its source, or its confidence drops
• quantitative-evidence-floors.md — state the volume floor, name the confounds and lag. A paper is the one format where this is load-bearing: the Methods and Limitations sections exist to carry it
• ontology.md — confidence levels + attribution
• ai-speak-anti-patterns.md — a paper in robot prose reads as generated, which is the opposite of the goal

Boundary with /thought-leadership: that skill writes the whitepaper — argument-led prose, contrarian angle, three human gates. This skill renders an existing study as a paper. They're sequential, not rival. "Write a whitepaper on X" → /thought-leadership. "Turn this study into a paper" → here.

When to run

• A whitepaper, benchmark study, survey, or internal dataset exists and needs a citable, research-grade rendering
• Building the anchor asset for data-led PR / link earning
• NOT for marketing collateral, one-pagers, or content without real data — the format only works if the substance is research

Steps

1. Intake

Collect: source material (findings, tables, method notes), author name(s) + affiliation + contact, whether this re-renders an earlier publication (if so: original date, sponsor, research partners), intended hosting URL (own domain under /research/ works well).

2. Fact-gate (mandatory, before any LaTeX)

Every headline claim must trace to a named primary source. For any market-sizing claim ("X million...", "Y% of..."), run the denominator test: divide the claim by its total population. If the share implied is implausible for the stated definition, the claim is definitionally unsound even if a source exists.

Worked example. "Two-thirds of households hold £100k+ in investable assets" — only true if "investable" quietly includes property and pensions. A source exists; the claim is still unsound. It gets replaced with a sourced one, or cut.

Unsourced or unsound claims get replaced or cut. Never rendered.

3. Structure

Follow the premium reference. Required elements, in order:

Element	Rule
Title + subtitle	Findings-oriented, method in the subtitle
Author block	Name / affiliation / URL / email, one column per author
Date + \thanks footnote	Provenance: sponsor, research partners, and what changed if re-rendering an earlier publication
Abstract	Findings-led, numbers up front, one paragraph
Keywords	4-6
Introduction	Ends with a numbered Contributions list
Data and Methods	One subsection per method or data source
Results	One claim per subsection heading; booktabs tables
Discussion	What the findings mean; second-order observations
Limitations and threats to validity	Mandatory — this section IS the credibility mechanism. Include a "commissioned research" paragraph when true.
Conclusion	Restate findings with numbers
Acknowledgements + References	Every stat in the paper maps to a \citep entry

Worked example — finding to claim-heading:

• Input (source material): "Survey: 62% of failed deployments traced back to configuration drift"
• Output (Results subsection): \subsection{Configuration drift dominates deployment failures} — the heading asserts the finding; the prose and table under it carry the number and the source.

4. Build

Copy the premium reference into a dedicated working folder as main.tex — never edit the file in the premium reference (it is the reusable template). Then tectonic main.tex.

Notes: the first-ever run downloads tectonic's package bundle over the network (slow, fails offline — not a hang); \bibitem optional args must keep the Source(Year) shape or natbib errors.

Fix every error and every overfull hbox (wide tables: \footnotesize + tighter \tabcolsep; long URLs: the template loads xurl). Then read the compiled PDF — page 1 and the references page — and confirm each stat cites the right source. An overfull table is invisible in the compile-log summary.

5. Integrity guards

• "Pending on arXiv" may only be claimed after an actual submission exists.
• Commissioned or sponsored research must say so, in the footnote and in Limitations.
• A re-rendering of earlier work must declare what changed and what didn't.

What good looks like

Evaluations — Every statistic maps to a \bibitem. Every market-sizing claim passed the denominator test. Limitations section present and specific (not "further research is needed"). Provenance footnote names sponsor + partners where they exist. Sample sizes and confounds stated in Methods per quantitative-evidence-floors.md. The compiled PDF was read, not just compiled. No claim in the paper is softer or harder than its evidence.

Common mistakes

• Rendering marketing claims in academic dress — the format amplifies scrutiny, not just credibility
• Skipping Limitations to "look stronger" — it works the other way: the Limitations section is what makes commissioned research citable
• Wide tables overflowing a two-column layout — check the compiled PDF visually, not just the compile exit code
• Citing one source for a sentence containing three claims — split the citations
• Claiming arXiv status before submitting

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Final ship gate

Run /premortem --output before ship. See /premortem skill for the 5 execution domains (will-it-resonate / will-it-convert / will-it-stay-on-brand / will-stakeholder-push-back / will-it-degrade-over-time) and output template.

Then run /voice-reviewer — the content ship gate: voice + brand quality (pm-loop.md).

Trivial-case escape: ## Premortem\nNo failure modes — trivial change satisfies the contract for genuinely trivial outputs.

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Persuasion & stickiness pass

Output complies with persuasion-and-stickiness.md — Cialdini's 7 persuasion levers + Heath's SUCCESs.

A paper is the narrow case: Authority and Credible carry nearly all the load, and both are earned by the Limitations section and the bibliography, not by adjectives. Concrete applies to the Results headings — the heading asserts the finding, in numbers. Do not reach for Scarcity, Emotional, or Stories here; a preprint that reaches for them stops reading as research, which is the whole asset.

Attribution

Contributed by Ben Moore (Discovered Labs / ClientCo), July 2026. The fact-gate (incl. the denominator test), paper structure table, template, and integrity guards are his. Adapted to Genesys frontmatter, doctrine, and gates.