Review Introduction

/review-introduction

Diagnose an introduction on all three dimensions the course defines: the information it carries, the way its ideas flow, and how it uses the literature. Report specific rewrites, not impressions.

This reviews the writing, not the science.

Before anything else

1. Load the style rules. Invoke paper-writing-style and read references/human-voice.md.
2. Lock the language. Use the language of the user's first message for the whole run. Any rewritten text is English.
3. Get the material. Read the introduction, and the rest of the manuscript if available: the results section is what tells you whether the introduction's promises are kept. Read the .bib file to audit the citations.

Dimension 1: information

Label each paragraph, and each sentence within it, with the movement it implements:

Present it as a table of paragraph number, opening words, and label.

Then report:

1. Missing movements, most serious first. A missing purpose is fatal. A missing gap makes the paper look unnecessary. A missing state of the art is the commonest omission and means the reader cannot tell whether anything was advanced.
2. Order. Movements should run context, gap, state of the art, purpose. Purpose belongs in the last paragraph; flag it appearing early unless it works.
3. Paragraphs labelled NONE. Say what would be lost by deleting them.
4. Proportion. Three paragraphs of context and one sentence of gap is the usual imbalance.

Dimension 2: flow

The section must funnel from general to specific, continuously, and never widen back out.

• Trace the funnel. For each paragraph, state whether it is broader than, narrower than, or level with the one before. Report every place it widens.
• Check inside paragraphs too. A paragraph should also narrow across its own sentences.
• Check the purpose is the narrowest point in the whole section. Nothing should be more specific than what this paper set out to do.

Report a widening as a concrete problem: name the two paragraphs and what the reader loses.

Dimension 3: citation and referencing

Audit against the three classes the course defines:

Then check:

• Recency. If the newest citation is more than two years old, say so plainly. It reads as out of touch and reviewers notice.
• Density. A gap or state-of-the-art claim with no citation at all is a defect. So is a paragraph where every sentence carries four keys.
• Placement. A seminal 1997 paper cited as the state of the art is a misuse of the class.
• Uncited claims. Any statement about the field or prior work that carries no reference.
• Keys that are not in the .bib, which will not compile.

Text reuse. If a passage reads as copied rather than restated, flag it. The rule is absolute: citation records where an idea came from, never where text came from. Paraphrasing while citing is correct; reproducing sentences while citing is still plagiarism. The one exception is a direct quotation in quotation marks, which is rare in this genre. Flag suspected reuse as something for the researcher to verify; do not accuse.

Style pass

Report each hit with the sentence and a rewrite:

• Em dashes. Any ---, or -- outside a numeric range.
• Specificity. Any sentence that could appear unchanged in another paper in the field.
• Sentence length. Any sentence whose opening is forgotten by its end.
• Nominalization. an improvement was observed for improved.
• Redundancy, including introduce a new, which appears constantly in purpose paragraphs.
• in this work, which should be in this paper, in this study or here we report.
• Words to use sparingly. preliminary, careful, novel, successfully.
• Plain English. utilization, in order to, the majority of, due to the fact that.
• Empty openers. it is important to note that.
• AI tells. delve, harness, leverage, underscore, pave the way, crucial role, in recent years there has been growing interest in.
• Stacked passive voice.
• Monotonous sentence openers. If most sentences in a paragraph open subject-then-verb, the paragraph lacks rhythm. Propose replacements using an adverb, a prepositional phrase, a dependent clause or an infinitive phrase.
• Ambiguity. as or since where because is meant; any pronoun with two possible referents.
• Abbreviations defined at first use, not stacked several to a short sentence.

Do not flag however, moreover, in contrast, nevertheless, in this paper, here we report, Recently, significant advances have been made in X \cite{}, or single deliberate hedges. These are the vocabulary the course teaches. Flagging them is a false positive and makes the whole review untrustworthy.

Connection to the rest of the paper

Only if the manuscript is available, and this is the check reviewers make hardest:

• Does the gap get answered? Every gap the introduction states should have its counterpart in the results and discussion. A promise the paper never keeps is the commonest structural fault in a manuscript.
• Does the purpose match? Compare the introduction's final paragraph against the abstract's purpose and the conclusions. All three should agree.
• Is the relevance claim supported by what the paper actually shows?

Report each mismatch naming both places.

Deliver

1. The three labelled tables: movements, funnel trace, citation audit.
2. Structural verdict, most serious first.
3. Style hits, each with sentence and rewrite.
4. Connection mismatches against the rest of the paper.
5. One rewritten introduction as a LaTeX fragment with movement labels, applying everything above, with % TODO: where the researcher must supply a citation or a fact.

Then ask whether to apply it. Never edit their files unasked.

Hard rules

• Never invent a citation to fill a gap you found. Name what is needed.
• Never invent recent literature. If the state of the art is thin, report that it is thin and ask the researcher which papers belong there.
• Never emit an em dash.
• Separate the writing verdict from scientific merit.
• If the introduction is already good, say so and keep the review short rather than manufacturing findings.