Nature Polishing

Nature-Style Academic Polishing

Improve scientific prose without changing its verified scientific content. Treat Nature-leaning as concise, evidence-led, readable academic English, not as an instruction to imitate a journal mechanically. Follow the user's target journal, house style, and explicit preferences when they differ from the defaults here.

Modes

Choose the smallest mode that matches the request.

• formal-polish: default mode for translation, restructuring, section rewriting, clarity, concision, academic register, and publication-quality English.
• human-final-pass: use only after formal polishing when the user wants credible academic prose that sounds less mechanical.

For human-final-pass:

• Mention once that it is intended for already polished text, then continue.
• Preserve facts, citations, formulas, LaTeX, numbers, technical terms, and claims.
• Apply natural variation only to eligible prose in Introduction, related-work Literature Review, Results or result-facing Discussion, Conclusion, and Limitations.
• Do not humanize Methods, formulas, tables, references, code, exact technical claims, or numeric statements.
• Never add grammar errors unless the user explicitly enables grammar-error mode in the same request.
• Read the three human-final-pass-* references before making substantial changes.

Non-Negotiable Boundaries

• Repair argument and section logic before sentence style.
• Do not invent data, references, mechanisms, evidence, or novelty claims.
• Do not upgrade association to causation or broaden generalisability.
• Treat an accurate associational verb as a sufficient causal boundary in ordinary prose. Do not automatically add exploratory, observational, non-causal, or a no-causality disclaimer to association, relationship, or correlation.
• Retain exploratory only when confirmatory versus post hoc status matters, and observational only when the study design or design contrast matters.
• Do not alter verified quantitative values, citations, formulas, or terminology.
• Do not hide a weak core argument under fluent prose. State material gaps plainly.
• If the central research question, evidence interpretation, or paper story needs substantive redesign, diagnose the problem and hand it to academic-research or good-story; do not solve it by silently changing the science during polishing.
• Prefer direct, information-dense claims over we do not claim, this does not mean, or our purpose is not ... but ....
• Do not compress away a load-bearing noun head, referent, article, preposition, or scope phrase merely to shorten a sentence. When concise wording becomes underspecified, state the object or relation explicitly.
• Prefer conventional, field-appropriate academic collocations over novel, literal, or over-compressed phrasing when both preserve meaning. Natural disciplinary English takes priority over stylistic cleverness.
• Increase descriptive precision by naming the supported setting, population, measure, temporal or spatial resolution, or comparison when it materially helps interpretation. Greater specificity must not strengthen causality, generalisability, novelty, or mechanism beyond the evidence.
• Remove self-undermining comparison language such as unfortunately, merely, only, still lags behind, failed to outperform, or broad performance degradation when it turns a non-central comparison into a general weakness. State a material trade-off neutrally and specifically.
• Keep a limitation when removing it would overstate the evidence. Place it where it clarifies interpretation rather than leading a contribution-heavy sentence.
• Do not create a new weakness, comparator, or burden of proof during polishing. For whole-manuscript contribution, Results, or Discussion work, read ../shared/advantage-led-research-narrative.md; reuse its continuity record, check Revision Invariants, preserve its integrity floor and do not hide a materially adverse result.
• Avoid em dashes as prose punctuation unless the user requests them.
• Use hyphens for compound modifiers and en dashes only for ranges or established forms. Do not create forms such as mobility–based or indoor–outdoor.

Workflow

1. Establish the target. Identify the paper type, section, target journal or style, source language, requested depth, and whether the text is ready for formal-polish or human-final-pass.
2. Diagnose before rewriting. Check, in order: paper type -> section job -> paragraph logic -> claim/evidence/boundary -> sentence style.
3. Load only the needed references. Use the table below. Do not load every reference for a narrow sentence-level request.
4. Rewrite at the highest necessary level. Rebuild section or paragraph logic when needed; otherwise make the smallest wording change that solves the problem.
5. Keep document-level state when needed. For a whole manuscript, multiple sections, or repeated revision rounds, read references/document-consistency.md and maintain terminology and claim-strength ledgers.
6. Preserve the evidence contract. Keep claim strength aligned with the source, retain necessary uncertainty, and distinguish observation from interpretation.
7. Run a final check. Verify meaning, citations, numbers, terminology, section function, overclaim, defensive phrasing, self-undermining comparison, qualifier stacking, punctuation, and target-journal fit.

Reference Router

Compact Section Check

• Introduction: importance -> known context -> unresolved gap -> question or aim -> approach and contribution, with a concise preview of the strongest supported finding. Keep detailed result narration in Results.
• Results: report what was observed, where or when, and with what quantitative support. Keep interpretation limited and intentional.
• Discussion: explain what the findings add, how they relate to prior work, which mechanism is plausible, and where the interpretation may fail.
• Conclusion: contribution -> key evidence -> memorable implication. Add no new data or defect; repeat a boundary only when needed to prevent misreading or required by the venue. Do not add a limitation or future-work quota.
• Methods: preserve reproducibility, assumptions, parameters, controls, software, and analysis details. Do not polish away necessary specificity.
• Abstract: context or problem -> gap or objective -> approach -> key results -> implication, unless the journal requires another structure.
• Title: accurate, searchable, evidence-supported, and no broader than the paper.

Chinese-to-English Work

Extract propositions before translating. Reconstruct causal, contrastive, qualifying, and inferential links instead of translating clause by clause. Keep technical terminology stable and verify causality and hedging after reconstruction.

Output

Unless the user requests another format, provide:

1. The polished text as plain prose.
2. Revision notes: with 3-5 short bullets covering substantive structural or stylistic changes.
3. A clear note when the rewrite changed section logic or exposed an unresolved evidence or argument gap.

For side-by-side requests, use Original, Polished, and Why changed. For document-level work, report only unresolved terminology or claim-strength conflicts unless the user asks to see the full ledgers.