Agentic skills for Claude Code that help you write better academic papers — review simulation, writing improvement, and revision assistance.

These aren't just prompts. The skills are built on a comprehensive academic writing guide — a community-maintained document compiled by Leshem Choshen covering everything from sentence-level craft (stress control, nominalization, parallelism) to paper structure, figure design, LaTeX tips, and rebuttal strategy. The skills encode this knowledge into structured, interactive workflows.

🚀 Quick Start with Overleaf

Clone your Overleaf project locally via git, cd into it, and start using the skills with Claude Code. Push changes back to Overleaf when you're done.

🛠 Skills

📝 Paper Review

Simulates a full multi-reviewer academic paper review. Three independent reviewers — senior adjacent-area, mid-career same-subfield, and early-career same-subfield — generate reviews in parallel. You then triage action items and apply revisions interactively.

Try: "review my paper" · "simulate reviewers" · "what would reviewers say" · "help me prepare for submission"

✍️ Writing Assistant

Improves your academic writing at any granularity — from a single sentence to a full section. Analyzes text against writing principles (sentence strength, stress control, precision, parallelism, etc.) and proposes rewrites with cited reasoning. The tips are based on the ever-growing guide.

Try: "improve this paragraph" · "rewrite this section" · "check my writing" · "make this sentence stronger"

📦 Installation

Plugin install (recommended)

claude plugin add --repo borgr/paper-sharpener

This makes the skills available in all your projects.

Global install — all projects

Clone into your global Claude Code skills directory:

git clone [email protected]:borgr/paper-sharpener.git ~/.claude/skills/paper-sharpener

The skills will be available in every project you open with Claude Code.

Per-project install

Clone into a specific paper project's .claude/ directory:

cd your-paper-repo
git clone [email protected]:borgr/paper-sharpener.git .claude/skills/paper-sharpener

The skills will only be available in that project.

🎨 Customizing

The skills are just Markdown files — you can tweak them by talking to Claude Code. For example:

"add a reviewer persona focused on statistical rigor"
"make the writing assistant ignore passive voice"
"change the review triage to start with structural issues first"

Each paper repo also gets its own memory automatically. The skills remember your decisions (rejected review items, conventions, editing preferences) across sessions, stored in your paper's .claude/ directory.

🤝 Contributing

This is an evergrowing project — contributions welcome!

Improve an existing skill — Edit the SKILL.md or reference files under skills/<skill-name>/ and open a PR
Add a new skill — Create a new directory under skills/ with a SKILL.md file (use the existing skills as a template)
Improve the writing guide — references/writing-guide.md is shared across skills; improvements there benefit everything

💡 Skills we'd love to see

Skill	Description
Rebuttal assistant	Help draft responses to reviewer comments, using the rebuttal strategies from the writing guide
Figure & table auditor	Dedicated pass for graphics quality, caption clarity, color accessibility, and consistency
Research question debater	Challenge and sharpen your research question, framing, and scope before you start writing

🙏 Credits

The writing tips were mostly written by Leshem Choshen, with the help of the community.
The skill adaptations were done by Yotam Perlitz.
The improvements are now up to all of us — used it? Adapted it? Aid others.