Nature-Style Mock Peer Review

Nature Reviewer Assessment Skill

Use this skill to simulate a Nature-style reviewer assessment package from the referee side.

This skill is for reviewer-style manuscript evaluation, not for drafting the authors' response. If the user wants rebuttal writing, route to nature-response.

Default stance

• Ground the review only in the local source basis plus manuscript facts supplied by the user.
• Evaluate the manuscript against source-grounded axes: originality, scientific importance, interdisciplinary readership, technical soundness, and readability for nonspecialists.
• Use the 12-axis technical concern taxonomy only as an internal coverage checklist; it supplements but never replaces the five source-grounded axes.
• Return exactly 3 mutually blind reviewer reports + 1 post-review synthesis unless the user explicitly asks for another structure.
• Give every reviewer only the same immutable manuscript/source packet, the same journal criteria, and that reviewer's preassigned emphasis. Never provide another review, a shared concern ledger, a draft synthesis, or hints about what another reviewer noticed.
• Run each reviewer in a genuinely separate context, subagent, process, or invocation. If the environment cannot isolate contexts, generate one reviewer report per invocation or explicitly state that mutual blindness cannot be guaranteed; never present shared-context drafting as independent peer review.
• Define emphasis briefs before any report is generated. They are working lenses, not reviewer identities, specialties, institutions, or biographies.
• Freeze each individual report before comparing them. Natural duplication or disagreement is valid evidence of independent review and must not be edited away to manufacture diversity.
• After all reports are frozen, run references/forensic-consistency-audit.md as a separate editorial pass. Audit arithmetic, metric bounds, aggregation levels, prose-table ordering, duplicate displays, dispersion anomalies, provenance and reproducibility. Never feed audit findings back into reviewer contexts or edit frozen reports after comparison.
• Identify who would be interested in the results and why.
• Identify technical failings that must be addressed before the authors' case is established.
• Give every substantive concern a stable ID, a faithful claim_pointer, and a verifiable evidence_pointer; mark missing locations instead of inventing them.
• Separate user-visible concerns into Major Concerns and Minor Comments. Mark a Major Concern Blocking Yes only when the current manuscript cannot establish its central case until that concern is resolved; Minor Comments are never blocking.
• Do not impose a concern quota. If no grounded concern exists at a level, state that explicitly instead of inventing one.
• Keep the critique intellectually sharp but professionally phrased; severity comes from impact on the manuscript's case, not from hostile wording.
• Avoid em dashes, en dashes, and colons as routine prose punctuation throughout reviewer reports and synthesis. Prefer a new sentence, comma, semicolon, parentheses, or a short heading followed by a new line. Retain ordinary hyphens in standard compound terms and stable IDs such as R1-M1. Preserve punctuation in source-faithful titles, quotations, formulas, identifiers, URLs, times, and required machine-readable syntax when changing it would be inaccurate.
• Distinguish clearly between what is supported, what is weak, and what is not assessable from the provided material.
• When the manuscript has a clear technical domain, use claim-dependent domain gates as supporting checks, but keep the output inside the same 3-reviewer nature-reviewer structure.
• Do not claim the editor's final decision or certainty about fit to Nature.

Accepted inputs

The skill may receive:

• full manuscript draft
• abstract, summary paragraph, or cover-summary style text
• introduction, results, discussion, or methods excerpts
• figure legends, selected figures, or result notes
• author notes in Chinese or English describing the claimed contribution
• pre-submission positioning notes

If the provided material is partial, perform a bounded review and mark the assessment boundary explicitly.

Workflow

1. Identify the input scope and whether the job is a reviewer-style assessment rather than rebuttal drafting.
2. Build one immutable review packet containing only the supplied manuscript, verified source anchors, assessment boundary, and common journal criteria. Do not add analytical conclusions or suspected concerns to this packet.
3. Define the reviewer count and emphasis briefs before launching any reviewer.
4. Launch each reviewer in an isolated context. Pass only the immutable review packet, that reviewer's emphasis brief, the common report skeleton, and the same grounding rules.
5. Inside each isolated review, independently assess readiness and the source-grounded axes, then build that reviewer's own concern ledger using references/technical-concern-taxonomy.md. If relevant, load only the applicable section of references/domain-specific-review-gates.md inside that same isolated context.
6. Finalize and freeze every reviewer report. Do not show a completed or partial report to another reviewer, and do not redistribute concerns to control overlap.
7. After all reports are frozen, run the forensic consistency audit in a separate editorial pass using references/forensic-consistency-audit.md. Classify findings as confirmed internal error, aggregation ambiguity, provenance gap, suspected duplication, unresolved input needed, not assessable, or passed. Do not feed audit findings back into reviewer contexts or edit frozen reports after comparison.
8. Compare the frozen reports in a separate synthesis pass. Reconcile independently created concerns to shared synthesis keys, and label consensus only when at least two reports independently raise the same underlying concern. Keep reviewer consensus and forensic audit findings separate.
9. Generate Cross-review synthesis (post-review; not shown to reviewers) with consensus blocking concerns, other major concerns, forensic consistency findings, the minor-revision checklist, and genuine differences in emphasis or judgment.
10. Run QA for reviewer isolation, severity calibration, blocking calibration, evidence anchoring, groundedness, coverage, role boundaries, non-invention, and forensic consistency. Overlap is measured only after freezing and must never trigger retroactive rewriting of individual reports.