External Positioning

external-positioning

The project's claims will be read by skeptical strangers. This skill keeps the external story honest before it ships: novelty is bookkept rather than felt, citations are verified rather than pattern-matched, claim strength is scoped to evidence strength, and nothing enters a draft that a reviewer could not reproduce from the record.

When to use

• Writing or reviewing contribution statements, abstracts, related-work sections.
• Adding any citation to the project record.
• A claim is about to travel — paper draft, talk, README, funding text.
• Pre-submission: the full positioning + citation + reproducibility sweep.

When NOT to use

• Internal decisions and their rationale — decision-log.
• The statistical form of a result — statistical-reporting.
• Verifying and formatting citations — lit-anchor (the sole citation authority).

Novelty bookkeeping

Keep a claims ledger (a section in the paper-planning doc or a standalone file): each paper-bound claim classified and anchored —

• novel — no prior work found doing this; the search that failed to find it is recorded (venues/queries/date), because "we found nothing" is an auditable statement;
• known, applied — exists elsewhere, new in this setting; cite the origin;
• confirmation / negative — replicates or refutes something; cite what it tests.

A novelty claim without a recorded search is a feeling with formatting. Re-run the search near submission — the literature moved while you worked.

Citations

Citations: see lit-anchor (the sole citation authority) — individual DOI resolution, distrust of bulk-generated bibliographies, the abstract-only-cannot-carry-a-load-bearing-claim rule, and tracked citation debt all live there.

Figure regeneration

A figure that cannot be regenerated from one command does not go in the paper. No exceptions at submission time; the time to enforce is at creation time.

1. One command per figure. Every kept figure regenerates via a single recorded command (a plotting script or notebook cell path + arguments) reading tracked code and evidence data — no manual pipeline of clicks.
2. Map figure → generator → data. Keep the mapping discoverable: a figure registry in the docs, or a naming convention (fig3_<topic> generated by a function/script of the same name), plus the evidence directory it reads.
3. No hand-edited figures. Annotations, croppings, and style fixes go into the plotting code; a figure edited in an image editor is unregenerable by construction.
4. Regenerate on upstream change. When the evidence data or plotting code changes, the figure is stale until re-run — treat committed stale figures as drift (layer-sync).
5. Pre-submission sweep: rebuild every paper figure from scratch and diff against the committed versions; investigate any mismatch.

Claim scoping (honesty labels)

Scope every claim to its evidence tier, in the text itself:

• calibrated measurement → claim the number;
• physics/theory-grounded model without calibration → claim shape and ranking, label the absolute values "to be calibrated";
• design operating point → say so ("chosen design point", not "optimal");
• single-setting evidence → claim the setting, not the universe ("in our configuration").

Over-claiming is the cheapest thing a reviewer can catch and the most expensive to walk back; the label costs one clause.

The reproducibility bar (before any claim travels)

A claim may enter a draft only when its chain is complete: evidence directory with meta (evidence-convention), environment + input + seed provenance (run-provenance), statistical treatment (statistical-reporting), regenerable figures (above), and verified citations (lit-anchor). The pre-submission sweep re-checks the chain end-to-end for every headline claim.

Rules

1. The contribution list is written against the ledger, not from memory — every "we are the first to X" traces to a recorded search.
2. Negative and boundary results go in the story — a mapped dead end or a binding constraint (negative-results-ledger) positioned honestly reads as rigor, not weakness.
3. Every number in the abstract exists in a table with N and uncertainty behind it.
4. Fix the source, then the story. When positioning review finds an unsupported claim, the evidence gets strengthened or the claim gets weakened — the wording never bridges the gap alone.

Configuration

• {{evidence_dir}}, {{decision_log}} — where claim chains and their decisions live.

Provenance & maintenance

Authored from the scholarly-integrity canon (novelty auditing, citation verification, calibrated claim language), grounded in working practice: a one-at-a-time identifier verification protocol adopted after machine-generated references were caught fabricating entries; an explicit full-text-before-submission obligation for abstract-only sources; and shipped claims scoped as physics-grounded shape/ranking with absolute calibration labeled future work. See the pack's examples/ directory for the worked exemplar mapping.

Re-verify in your project:

• Pick two random bibliography entries; resolve their identifiers and check they support their citing sentences.
• grep -rn "TODO.*cite\|abstract-only\|UNVERIFIED" docs/ | head — citation debt is marked, and shrinking.
• For one headline claim, walk the chain: draft sentence → table → evidence dir → meta → seeds. Any missing link fails the bar.