Lit Ingest

Core Rule

Ingest is extraction, not authorship. Everything in the summary and the proposed .bib entry comes FROM the source document in front of you — never from your prior, never from what a paper with this title "probably" says. A summary that asserts a finding the source does not state, or a .bib entry with a guessed DOI, is a fabrication — the one thing this kit exists to prevent. Metadata you cannot read with confidence is left as [VALUE — verify], never filled in. Quotes are verbatim and carry a locator. You read one source and turn it into one vault/summaries/<bibkey>.md page plus a proposed references.bib entry; you never invent a second source to go with it.

When to Use

Invoke with /lit-ingest <source> when:

• You have added a paper to sources/ (PDF/txt/md) and want it in the vault.
• You want to paste extracted text or notes for a source and have it summarized + linked.
• /literature-review reported a gap, you fetched a real paper to fill it, and now need it ingested so the next synthesis can use it.
• A references.bib entry exists as status: metadata-only and you now have the full text to upgrade its page.

<source> is a path under sources/ (e.g. /lit-ingest sources/doe2023-tooluse.pdf) or the word paste followed by the text. One source per invocation — batch ingests go through the vault-maintainer agent so the main thread stays clean.

Process

Phase 1 — Read the source (never modify it)

1. Read VAULT.md (the schema) and MANUSCRIPT_MAP.md → Thesis so the summary's "Relevance to thesis" section is grounded in the actual argument.
2. Read the raw source from sources/ (use the pdf skill for PDFs) or take the pasted text. Treat it as immutable — protect-sources.sh blocks edits to sources/; never try to "clean up" or rewrite the raw file.
3. If the text is unreadable (scanned image, OCR garbage, truncated paste), say so and stop — do not summarize a document you cannot actually read. An honest "cannot read this PDF" beats a confident summary of nothing.

Phase 2 — Extract metadata & choose the cite key

From the document's own front matter (title block, author list, venue line, DOI on page 1):

• Pull title, authors, year, venue. For any field you cannot read with confidence, write [VALUE — verify] — never guess a year or a venue from the title.
• Choose a cite key as firstauthorYEARkeyword (e.g. doe2023tooluse). If the year is unknown, the key still needs to be stable — pick the keyword and flag the year. Keep it consistent with any existing scheme in references.bib.
• The page filename is exactly the cite key: vault/summaries/<bibkey>.md. One summary per .bib key (Rule 4 in VAULT.md).

Phase 3 — Write the summary page

Create vault/summaries/<bibkey>.md from vault/_templates/source.md, filling every section per the VAULT.md source-page schema:

• Summary — 2–4 sentences in your words, grounded in the text.
• Key claims (with locators) — each claim tagged with a page/§ locator and a strength verb (shows / reports / suggests). No locator → not a logged claim.
• Method — enough to judge the evidence's weight (design, sample, what was measured).
• Findings — the actual results with numbers and locators. Copy numbers exactly; if a number is unreadable, write [VALUE — verify], never approximate one.
• Limitations / scope — what the source does NOT establish. This is the guardrail that stops a later draft from overclaiming it.
• Relevance to thesis — supports / contradicts / frames the current argument.
• Quotes (verbatim + locator) — exact wording with p. <n>. A quote you cannot place to a page does not go in.
• Open questions / follow-ups — citation-chaining leads (papers it cites worth fetching), things to verify.

Set status: honestly: read (full text digested), skimmed (read partially — flag what you did not cover), or metadata-only (no full text — you may record its existence but must NOT assert findings from it).

Phase 4 — Propose the references.bib entry (extracted, not invented)

Propose a BibTeX entry built from the metadata you extracted in Phase 2:

@inproceedings{doe2023tooluse,
  title     = {Tool-augmented language models for single-turn QA},
  author    = {Doe, Jane and Roe, Richard},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of ExampleCL},
  year      = {2023},
  doi       = {[VALUE — verify]}
}

• Never fabricate a DOI. If page 1 carries no DOI, leave it [VALUE — verify] or omit the field. block-fabrication.sh rejects placeholder/fake-shaped DOIs (10.xxxx, example.com, TODO) — so a half-known reference surfaces for the author instead of slipping in as real. That is the system working, not a failure.
• Show the entry for the author to paste into references.bib; do not silently assume it is already there. (Writing the .bib is the author's call; citation-gate.sh later confirms the \cite resolves.)
• If the cite key already exists in references.bib, reconcile rather than duplicate — flag any mismatch between the existing entry and what the document says.

Phase 5 — Cross-reference concepts & entities

Wire the new page into the vault with [[wikilinks]]:

• For each cross-source idea the source bears on, link/create vault/concepts/<concept>.md (from vault/_templates/concept.md) — e.g. [[tool-call-hallucination]], [[verification-gating]]. Add this source to the concept's "Sources that bear on it" with its stance, and note any tension with sources already listed.
• For each benchmark / dataset / method / model / group, link/create vault/entities/<entity>.md (from vault/_templates/entity.md) — e.g. [[NeurIPS-tooluse-benchmark]]. Record how this source uses it and any caveat (contamination, version drift).
• A [[link]] to a page that does not exist yet is fine — it marks something worth writing. Do not invent the linked page's contents; create a stub and move on.

Phase 6 — Update index + log (mandatory)

• Add a line to vault/index.md → ## Sources (by cite key), newest first: - [[doe2023tooluse]] — Tool-augmented LMs for single-turn QA (Doe & Roe, 2023) — read. List any new concept/entity pages under their headings.
• Append one line to vault/log.md (append-only, newest at the bottom): 2026-06-03 ingest doe2023tooluse — created summary, proposed .bib entry, linked [[verification-gating]].

Never rewrite the log; never skip the index. Per VAULT.md Rule 3, no ingest is complete without both.

Output Format

1. The summary page — written to vault/summaries/<bibkey>.md, conforming to the schema.
2. Proposed .bib entry — shown in a fenced block for the author to paste; uncertain fields as [VALUE — verify], no invented DOI.
3. Cross-reference report — which concepts/ and entities/ pages were created or touched, and the new [[wikilinks]].
4. Index + log diff — the lines added.
5. Flags — every [VALUE — verify] left open, the status: set, and any source passage that was unreadable. End with the honest tally: (claims logged / quotes captured / fields left to verify).

Pairs With

• /literature-review — the consumer: it synthesizes from the summaries this skill writes. Ingest a fetched source here, then re-run the review to close the gap honestly.
• fact-checker agent — reads sources/ (not the summary) for exact wording; the summary's locators tell it where to look.
• vault-maintainer agent — dispatch it for batch ingest / heavy cross-referencing so the main thread stays clean.
• block-fabrication.sh (PreToolUse) — rejects the proposed .bib entry if it carries a placeholder/fake DOI. Flag it [VALUE — verify], do not invent one.
• citation-gate.sh (PostToolUse) — later confirms the \cite{<bibkey>} resolves once the entry is in references.bib.
• /lit-lint — run after a batch of ingests to catch orphans and missing locators.

Notes

• Never modify sources/. Derive into vault/; the raw file is evidence and stays byte-for-byte intact (protect-sources.sh enforces this).
• The summary is a convenience layer, never an override: when /literature-review or fact-checker needs exact wording, they return to sources/, not the summary (VAULT.md Rule 5).
• metadata-only is a real, valid status — a citation without the content. Record the source's existence; do NOT assert its findings until the full text is ingested.
• Synthesis and judging relevance are Reasoner-tier work (see CLAUDE.md → Model Selection); mechanical metadata extraction is fine on the Drafter.
• If ingesting reveals the source contradicts a claim already in the manuscript, that is a finding — surface it; do not quietly smooth it over.