Research Idea Evaluator

Idea Evaluator

Overview

This skill evaluates a preliminary research idea from the combined perspective of a top-venue reviewer and an experienced advisor. It scores the idea against five improvement dimensions from the idea-generation guide (Higher, Faster, Stronger, Cheaper, Broader), matches the idea's lifecycle against the user's actual capability and available hours per week, probes whether the idea has paradigm-shift potential, flags fatal flaws, and returns one of three verdicts: Strong Accept, Accept with Revisions, or Reject and Pivot.

The goal is to kill weak ideas before the student invests months, and to shape promising-but-underdeveloped ideas into stronger forms before writing begins.

When to use this skill

• The user has a draft idea and asks whether it is worth pursuing.
• The user asks for novelty check, feasibility assessment, or scoring.
• Before the user commits to a paper scope or starts implementation.
• The user is comparing two or three candidate ideas and needs a structured trade-off.
• The user suspects scope creep and wants an external check.
• The user mentions 'evaluate this idea', 'score this idea', 'assess feasibility', or 'is this a good research direction'.

When NOT to use this skill

• The user has already implemented the idea and is writing the paper. Use intro-drafter, tech-paper-template, or benchmark-paper-template (separate plugin) instead.
• The user explicitly wants brainstorming of new ideas from scratch. Use plain conversation; see handbook 2.3 for a disruptive-innovation playbook.
• The user asks for review of an existing manuscript. Use pre-submission-reviewer.
• The user asks to evaluate a benchmark contribution specifically. Use benchmark-paper-template (separate plugin) in targeted mode.

Core procedure

Step 1: First impression and paper-type positioning

Read the user's idea description. In one paragraph, state whether the idea reads as Novel Problem, Novel Method, or New Setting. Is the story compelling in one sentence? If you cannot write that sentence, the idea itself is probably not yet clear enough for evaluation; ask the user to restate.

While restating, classify the research paradigm by method, not by department name: experiments, benchmarks, ablations, or model architectures mean STEM (continue with the five dimensions and fatal flaws below); text analysis, archives, or conceptual argument mean humanities; surveys, interviews, statistics, or fieldwork mean empirical social science; regressions, IV, DID, RDD, or panel data mean finance or economics; statutes, cases, or doctrine mean law.

See: references/domain-evaluation-frameworks.md for the substitute five-dimension frameworks and fatal-flaw substitutions used by the non-STEM paradigms. When the paradigm is unclear, ask one question: "is the core method experiments, surveys, text analysis, or theoretical derivation?"

Step 2: Fatal-flaws audit (early gate)

See: references/fatal-flaws.md for the ten canonical fatal flaws, each with a detection rule and a defense strategy.

Run the fatal-flaws audit before the scoring steps rather than after them. Identify at most two fatal flaws. For each, state the flaw, cite the detection rule, and recommend a concrete defense.

Ground the novelty flaw (F1) in real retrieval whenever the environment has a literature-search capability (a scholarly search tool, web search over scholarly indexes, or shell access to public APIs). Extract two or three keyword groups from the idea (core method plus domain; mechanism plus task; technique plus benchmark), search, and name the three to five closest published works with title, authors, and year. For each, state which axis actually differs: the object acted on, the mechanism, the input granularity, or the problem setting. A similar title alone never establishes duplication; duplication requires failing to find even one differing axis. Retrieval results support metadata-level judgments only (who did what, where); never quote numbers or method details from search snippets. And "not found" does not prove novelty: report it as "no directly overlapping work retrieved under these keywords". With no retrieval capability, label the novelty judgment "unverified; literature check required".

A data-refuted core mechanism is an automatic CRITICAL. If the user's own reported data or attachments already show the core mechanism matched or beaten by a baseline or simple control, lock the verdict to Reject and Pivot; write no defense and invent no optimistic threshold. See: references/fatal-flaws.md, the data-refuted section, for the exact boundary between "refuted by data" and "merely untested".

Short-circuit rule. If any fatal flaw is tagged CRITICAL in the severity taxonomy (single-handedly causes rejection, unfixable within the lifecycle), stop here and emit the verdict directly:

• Verdict: Reject and Pivot.
• Output sections 1 (First impression), 2 (Fatal flaws with the CRITICAL flaw), and 7 (Verdict with the flaw-driven rationale) only.
• Do not run the five-dimension scoring, paradigm-shift probe, feasibility check, or integrity gate. Those would be decoration on a rejection.

If no CRITICAL flaw is found, continue to Step 3.

Step 3: Lifecycle and capability matching

See: references/lifecycle-capability-matching.md for the six-category lifecycle matrix, capability self-assessment rubric, and mismatch recovery strategies.

Map the idea onto one of six categories (Application, Foundational Theory, Cross-Disciplinary, Frontier Exploration, Data-Intensive, Innovative Technique). Match against the user's declared capability (effective hours per week, skill depth, theoretical versus applied strength). Output a mismatch flag if lifecycle is shorter than the user's realistic execution window.

Step 4: Five-dimension scoring

See: references/five-dimensions.md for each dimension's entry strategies, scoring rubric, and worked examples.

Score the idea on each of:

• Higher: effectiveness and accuracy gains.
• Faster: efficiency and cost reduction.
• Stronger: robustness, noise tolerance, generalisation.
• Cheaper: data, annotation, or solution cost reduction.
• Broader: cross-domain transplantation or unification.

Score each 1-10 with explicit evidence from the user's stated contribution. Identify the two or three dimensions where the idea has the highest ceiling and recommend emphasising those in the paper.

Scoring discipline: start every dimension at 5 and justify movement. Two kinds of grounds move a score up, and both count: measured results the user reported (quote them), or a mechanism argument that holds up (label the score "mechanism-based, not yet confirmed by data"). A solid, untested mechanism can reach 8 or 9 with that label plus a named validation experiment; do not systematically cap untested ideas. A dimension with neither data nor mechanism stays at 5 with "no grounds given". Watch attribution: when an impressive gain plausibly comes from a peripheral factor (routing, post-processing, a stronger base model, favorable samples), cap that dimension until an ablation isolates the core mechanism. The scoring reference's final two sections cover both rules in detail.

For non-STEM paradigms, score the substitute dimensions from references/domain-evaluation-frameworks.md instead, under the same discipline.