Why This Kit
Why a configuration kit beats prompting carefully — deterministic citation discipline, a Literature Vault, and review agents that pre-empt Reviewer 2.
Out of the box, Claude Code writes fluent academic prose — which is exactly the danger.
In code, a hallucination breaks the build and you find out. In a manuscript, a hallucinated citation looks correct — and survives to peer review, or print.
What goes wrong without it
Left to its defaults, the agent will:
- Invent a citation, DOI, author, or page number that looks real but isn't
- State a statistic or measured value it doesn't actually have
- Overclaim — "causes" where the evidence only licenses "is associated with"
- Drift off the thesis and pad sections with plausible filler
- Quote a source it never read, with no locator
These are not bugs in the model — they are the predictable behavior of a fluent text generator with no enforced grounding.
Why "prompt carefully" isn't enough
You can put "don't invent citations" in a prompt. It works until the third turn, when the instruction has scrolled out of the model's attention and a plausible-looking DOI slips in. Advisory rules degrade; deterministic hooks do not.
The kit makes the discipline mechanical:
| Concern | Advisory (a prompt) | Deterministic (this kit) |
|---|---|---|
| Fake-shaped DOI | "please don't" | block-fabrication returns exit 2 |
Dangling \cite{key} | hope you notice | citation-gate fails the gate |
| Editing raw evidence | "be careful" | protect-sources blocks the write |
| Completing with a failed gate | trust | stop-gate blocks completion |
What you get
- CLAUDE.md — the cardinal rule and the Question → Evidence → Draft → Verify → Cite loop, read at every session boot.
- 14 deterministic hooks — citation gates, fabrication blocks, compile checks, word budgets, figure-orphan detection — proven by ResearchKitBench (34 scenarios, CI on Linux + macOS).
- 5 review agents —
peer-reviewer,integrity-reviewer,fact-checker,outline-planner,vault-maintainer— to pre-empt Reviewer 2 before submission. - 23 skills —
/claim-check,/citation-audit,/literature-review,/manuscript-cycle, and more. - A Literature Vault — an annotated bibliography so "every claim traces to a real source" has somewhere to trace to.
- 4 field overlays — AI/ML, life sciences, social sciences, medicine — with the right reporting standards.
It stays yours
Everything is plain markdown and shell. No lock-in, MIT-licensed, auditable in a sitting. One source CLAUDE.md derives a cross-tool AGENTS.md (and Cursor / Windsurf / Aider configs) via ./scripts/convert.sh.