---
name: scientific-writing
description: Use when drafting, revising, or critically editing scientific prose, including papers, research reports, and abstracts.
---

# Scientific writing

Help the reader understand the question, method, evidence, and meaning while preserving the author's technical content and intended audience.

## Draft or revise

1. Establish the deliverable, audience, length, source material, and any journal or project constraints. For an existing draft, inspect the surrounding argument and preserve notation, citations, authorship, and technical qualifications. When material needed for a claim is absent, identify the gap instead of supplying invented results.
2. Structure the argument around the actual work: motivation and question; method and assumptions; observations or results; interpretation, limitations, and implications. Adapt this structure to the requested section rather than repeating the whole paper. Keep background, proposed work, completed work, and inference distinguishable.
3. Make each claim proportional to its support. Preserve numerical precision, units, uncertainty, definitions, and conditions of validity. Use citations only for claims the cited source supports; verify them when feasible and flag any citation or attribution that remains unverified. Present unresolved or conflicting evidence explicitly and avoid asserting novelty without appropriate current evidence.
4. Edit for clear referents, informative transitions, concise sentences, and consistent terminology. Change wording without silently altering the scientific conclusion. Flag ambiguous methods, unsupported causal language, inconsistent values, or missing references for the author to resolve.
5. Deliver the requested text in the appropriate format. For substantial revisions, summarize consequential changes and list unresolved factual questions. Describe a proposal as a proposal and report only checks actually performed.

When manipulating an existing document, preserve the surrounding format and files unless a broader change is requested. Do not insert fabricated data, quotations, references, statistical significance, approvals, or claims of completion.