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- Status: normative project contract
- Applies to: Core models, ingestion, extraction adapters, validation, verification, analysis, exports, Skills, documentation, and future integrations
PaperReading is not primarily a summarization system. It is infrastructure for producing research artifacts that remain open to criticism, source inspection, and reconstruction after automation has occurred.
This document derives the project's non-negotiable logic from the minimum requirements of defensible academic work. It is a design contract, not a claim that software can determine scientific truth or replace expert review.
- Academic research advances through claims that other people can inspect, challenge, and revise.
- A claim cannot be assessed without knowing its source evidence, inferential route, assumptions, and uncertainty.
- An automated workflow is trustworthy only if it preserves those elements instead of replacing them with fluent prose or an unexplained score.
- Therefore, PaperReading must optimize for epistemic integrity and auditability before speed, convenience, or engagement.
Legal authority, research ethics, privacy, consent, and source-licensing boundaries are hard constraints. Within those constraints, project decisions follow this priority order:
PaperReading's repository materials are released under the MIT License. That license governs the project software and associated documentation; it does not create permission to reuse third-party papers, datasets, user inputs, or extracted content.
epistemic integrity
> auditability
> reproducibility
> interoperability and backward compatibility
> convenience and performance
> growth metrics
Compatibility, speed, automation coverage, or stars never justify weakening a higher-priority requirement.
| ID | Rule | Required behavior | Forbidden shortcut |
|---|---|---|---|
| P1 | Preserve semantic boundaries | Keep source material, evidence spans, paper-reported claims, system assessment, and proposed research designs as different object types. | Mixing interpretation or generated ideas into a paper's reported findings. |
| P2 | Bind claims to inspectable evidence | Every source-grounded claim or reported result must resolve to evidence IDs and source locators. | Accepting unsupported prose because it sounds plausible. |
| P3 | Impose an inference ceiling | System-endorsed language must not be stronger than the design, identification strategy, and verified evidence support. | Converting association, fixed effects, or author rhetoric into an endorsed causal conclusion. |
| P4 | Preserve uncertainty and absence | Distinguish unknown, not reported, null result, not applicable, not run, partial, failed, and conflicting. Prefer abstention to fabrication. | Filling missing fields, silently dropping null results, or treating missing evidence as negative evidence. |
| P5 | Make status earned, not declared | verified, audited, and similar states may be produced only by the corresponding completed checks. |
Letting a caller or model self-assign a lifecycle state or confidence value. |
| P6 | Make transformations reproducible | Record source identity and hash, schema and pipeline versions, configuration, prompts/providers when applicable, timestamps, and deterministic migrations. | Silently reinterpreting old artifacts or hiding nondeterministic inputs. |
| P7 | Design for falsification and review | Derived statements must expose supporting evidence, assumptions, caveats, and failure reports so a reviewer can reject them. | Returning only a final score, summary, or recommendation with no inspectable basis. |
| P8 | Preserve research validity and selection context | Retain variable definitions and measurements, study/sample/corpus inclusion and exclusion, period, model and standard errors, identification assumptions, limitations, and generalization boundaries. | Treating an observed corpus as complete or collapsing heterogeneous studies into comparable-looking claims by discarding context. |
| P9 | Keep compatibility outside the epistemic core | Lossy legacy formats must be explicit projections from richer artifacts and covered by regression tests. | Reshaping the domain model around an Excel column or silently losing provenance to preserve an interface. |
| P10 | State capability boundaries honestly | A capability is shipped only when code, public contract, failure behavior, tests, and documentation exist. | Presenting a roadmap item, host capability, or model possibility as a repository feature. |
| P11 | Minimize data and respect rights | Process only authorized material, avoid unnecessary persistence, protect confidential data, and use redistributable or synthetic fixtures. | Committing copyrighted papers, confidential workbooks, credentials, personal paths, or unauthorized extracted text. |
| P12 | Keep human accountability visible | Automation may organize evidence and enforce constraints; researchers remain responsible for interpretation and use. | Describing verification as truth, a traceability score as study quality, or the tool as a substitute for peer review. |
PaperReading cannot establish validity by itself. It must preserve the information needed for researchers to evaluate it.
| Academic requirement | System implication | Boundary |
|---|---|---|
| Construct validity | Preserve the exact construct, variable definition, measurement, unit, source, and transformations. | Similar labels do not imply equivalent constructs. |
| Internal validity | Record design and identification assumptions; constrain causal language. | Source verification does not establish identification validity. |
| Statistical conclusion validity | Preserve estimates, uncertainty, standard errors, significance, robustness checks, and null results when reported. | Statistical significance does not establish effect size, substantive importance, or reliability. |
| External validity and coverage | Preserve population, sample, period, geography, institutional context, corpus/search boundaries, exclusions, and stated limits. | Findings must not be generalized beyond recorded support; absence in a reviewed corpus is not absence from the literature. |
| Reliability and reproducibility | Version artifacts and transformations; retain hashes, configuration, and run metadata. | Re-running a provider may remain nondeterministic and must be disclosed. |
| Falsifiability and transparency | Expose evidence links, assumptions, conflicts, partial states, and machine-readable failure reports. | A fluent explanation without a review path is insufficient. |
| Research ethics and legality | Enforce source boundaries, confidentiality, data minimization, and redistribution constraints. | Public availability does not imply permission to reuse or redistribute. |
The following expressions are intentionally not equivalent:
source-reported claim != PaperReading-endorsed conclusion
evidence locator verified != claim true != study valid
traceability score != probability of truth != paper quality
statistical significance != effect size != substantive importance
paper-reported limitation != researcher-identified limitation
research extension != finding reported by the paper
unknown != absent != null result != not applicable != not run != failed
not found in the reviewed corpus != absent from the literature
public visibility != permission to reuse
repository MIT License != rights to third-party research material
Models, interfaces, exports, and documentation must preserve these distinctions. If a target format cannot represent them, the loss must be explicit and confined to a projection.
flowchart LR
S["Source surface"] --> E["EvidenceSpan and locator"]
E --> G["Grounded source claim or finding"]
G --> V["Validation and source verification"]
G --> A["ResearchAnalysis"]
V --> A
A --> X["Assessment or proposed extension"]
G --> P["Explicit legacy projection"]
S -. "does not directly become" .-> A
X -. "must never be relabeled as" .-> G
Each transition must be inspectable. Reverse relabeling—from generated analysis back into source-grounded fact—is prohibited.
Before a feature or schema change is accepted, its author must answer:
- What research object is being created, transformed, or evaluated?
- Is each field source-derived, mechanically derived, researcher-authored, or AI-assisted?
- What evidence and locator support every source-grounded statement?
- Which assumptions and inference rules connect the evidence to the output?
- How are unknown, null, partial, conflicting, failed, and not-applicable states represented?
- What can be reproduced deterministically, and what nondeterminism is recorded?
- What does success mean, and which failure modes fail closed?
- What information could be lost through migration, export, or compatibility projection?
- What privacy, copyright, consent, or confidentiality boundary applies?
- Which success and failure-path tests prove the contract?
If any answer is missing, the capability remains a draft or roadmap hypothesis; it is not ready to be described as shipped.
A change is complete only when, where applicable:
- the research object and its semantic boundary are represented in a strict schema;
- evidence references resolve and provenance is preserved;
- uncertainty and abstention states survive round trips;
- inference-strength rules are enforced rather than merely documented;
- lifecycle status follows actual checks;
- versioning and migration behavior are explicit;
- success, rejection, partial, and failure paths are tested;
- lossy exports remain projections and do not redefine the Core;
- bilingual documentation separates implemented behavior from planned behavior; and
- fixtures and outputs respect source rights, privacy, and confidentiality.
| Principle | Current mechanism |
|---|---|
| P1, P8 | PaperPackage and GroundedPaperRecord separate grounded records, analysis, audit, and run metadata. |
| P2, P5 | EvidenceSpan and verification states plus package graph validation reject unresolved or unearned states. |
| P3 | Causal-language validation limits causal wording by design and identification support. |
| P4, P7 | PaperDraft retains candidates, conflicts, unresolved fields, and review state. |
| P5, P7 | Evidence verification returns verified, partial, and failed results with issues. |
| P6 | Versioned migration, schemas, deterministic examples, and RunManifest. |
| P9 | Legacy projection remains outside the domain and is regression-tested. |
| P10 | Roadmap, tests, and CI distinguish shipped contracts from hypotheses. |
| P11, P12 | Contribution licensing rules, security policy, synthetic examples, mutation safeguards, and explicit documentation boundaries. |
This map is descriptive, not proof of perfection. New evidence of a violated principle takes priority over preserving the current implementation.
PaperReading is not intended to:
- decide whether a paper is true or scientifically valid;
- replace peer review, domain expertise, or researcher responsibility;
- compress paper quality, truth, novelty, or publishability into one score;
- infer journal rankings or translate between ranking systems without independent evidence;
- maximize automation coverage or stars at the expense of research integrity; or
- hide uncertainty to make outputs appear complete.
When product incentives conflict with this contract, this contract wins.