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Contributing to Academic Research Skills

Contributing to Academic Research Skills

Thank you for your interest in contributing. This document explains what kinds of contributions we accept and how to submit them.

How to submit a contribution

ARS uses the standard fork-and-PR workflow. Fork the repo on GitHub, clone your fork, create a branch, make your changes, push to your fork, then open a PR against Imbad0202/academic-research-skills.

Important: You cannot push directly to this repo — you must fork it first and submit a PR from your fork.

What we accept

Community-maintained (fast merge)

These contributions can be merged quickly with minimal review:

Typo and formatting fixes — spelling, broken links, markdown rendering issues
New examples — pipeline output showcases, worked examples for specific disciplines
Translation improvements — better zh-TW or EN phrasing in READMEs or agent definitions

Requires maintainer review

These need careful review because they affect system behavior:

Journal and field reference lists — additions to top_journals_by_field.md, new discipline glossaries
Evaluation sets — gold-standard papers for calibration mode, benchmark data
New reference files — methodology guides, citation format references, domain-specific protocols
Bug and drift fixes — version inconsistencies, broken cross-references, incorrect metadata
Mode changes — new modes, trigger keyword changes, oversight level adjustments

Requires maintainer approval + discussion

Open an issue first before submitting a PR for these:

Agent definition changes — modifications to any file in */agents/*.md
IRON RULE modifications — any change to rules marked with the IRON RULE marker
Ethics and integrity rules — changes to the failure mode checklist, integrity protocols, or ethics review
Handoff schema changes — modifications to shared/handoff_schemas.md
New skills or modes — additions to the pipeline

Platform ports (community-maintained only)

This repository is the reference distribution of ARS, built for Claude Code. Ports to other agent platforms (Opencode, Cursor, Continue, Aider, etc.) are accepted as community-maintained contributions. Two structural shapes are acceptable — both keep core ARS content as the source of truth:

In-tree wrapper. Add a top-level <platform>/ directory in this repo (e.g. opencode/) containing the manifest, plugin entry, and dispatch shims. Core ARS files (skills/*/SKILL.md, agents/*.md, shared/, scripts/) remain unmodified.
Sibling distribution. A separate repository that vendors ARS workflow content with: (1) upstream commit hash pinned (e.g. in a manifest.json); (2) a written update / sync policy; (3) vendored content unmodified — only the outer routing / adapter layer is platform-specific.

Either shape is accepted under the same maintainer-facing conditions:

Named maintainer. The PR description (in-tree) or repo README (sibling) must identify who will keep the port in sync with ARS minor releases (~6-week cadence) and triage platform-specific bug reports. Platform-specific issues will be redirected to that maintainer.
End-to-end evidence. Include at least one full academic-pipeline run on the target platform, committed under examples/<platform>/ (in-tree) or under an examples/ path in the sibling repo, so regressions are detectable.
Model-portability note. ARS prompts are calibrated against Claude (Opus for architecture/review, Sonnet for execution; never Haiku). The PR must document which providers/models were tested and where downstream-agent behavior diverged from the Claude baseline.
Open a design issue first before submitting the PR (for in-tree) or before requesting sibling-distribution recognition in this repo's README.

PR guidelines

One concern per PR — don't mix unrelated changes
Describe what and why — explain the motivation, not just the change
Reference issues — if your PR addresses an open issue, link it
Test your changes — if you're modifying agent definitions, try running the skill to confirm it works as expected
Keep READMEs in sync — if your change affects user-facing documentation, update README.md, README.zh-CN.md, README.zh-TW.md, README.ja-JP.md, and README.ko-KR.md when applicable

Governance

Maintainer

The repo is maintained by Cheng-I Wu (HEEACT). The maintainer has final say on all merges.

Decision principles

Accuracy over completeness — we'd rather have fewer, verified journal entries than a long unvetted list
Human-in-the-loop always — contributions that reduce human oversight or enable fully autonomous paper generation will be declined
No detection evasion — features designed to make AI-generated text harder to detect (as opposed to higher quality) are out of scope. See Issue #3 for context.
Discipline diversity welcome — ARS defaults to higher education research but aims to be domain-agnostic. Discipline-specific modules are encouraged.

Release checklist

Most release mechanics are CI-enforced (check_version_consistency.py keeps CLAUDE.md / SKILL.md / CHANGELOG / plugin manifests / README badge in lockstep; the release-cooldown workflow paces tags; the changelog-covers-merges workflow gates release-prep PRs). One step still has a manual form for tag flows that skip a release branch:

Before tagging: CHANGELOG covers every merge

CI runs this automatically on every release-prep PR (head branch release/**): the Changelog Covers Merges workflow audits every release-worthy commit merged to main since the previous release tag and fails unless its issue/PR number (#N) is referenced in CHANGELOG.md above the previous release's section — under ## [Unreleased], or under the version section the prep PR just promoted (spec §0.2).

For a tag cut without a release/ branch, run the same gate by hand from the release-prep state (before the vX.Y.Z tag exists): python3 scripts/check_changelog_covers_merges.py. Resolve each finding (add a CHANGELOG entry citing its #N) or confirm it is legitimately exempt (a chore/test/ci/build commit, or an internal docs(design)/docs(superpowers) commit, or the once-per-release docs(release) alignment commit; docs(i18n) is deliberately NOT exempt — translation changes are user-facing). This is the machine-checked half of the [doc-aligned: yyyy-mm-dd] tag-message discipline. Run it on the release-prep state, not on a feature branch — in-progress branch commits have no PR suffix yet and will report as unverifiable (CI avoids this by auditing --merges-ref origin/main).

One convention is editorial and lives here:

`Real-use findings` subsection (#395)

When drafting a release's CHANGELOG entry, include a Real-use findings subsection if any of the release's issues were discovered through actual use of the suite on a real paper — one line per issue, naming the run that surfaced it. Paper-derived / external-motivation work (the Zhao / Kong / Kim tracks) does NOT belong here; the subsection exists precisely to make the other provenance class visible. Background: the v3.6.7 production chapter run surfaced 17 drift patterns, but that lived-experience provenance was buried in spec prose with no fixed, greppable home — and release motivation since v3.8 has been almost entirely external papers, which is itself a signal worth seeing per release. If a release has no real-use findings, omit the subsection; never pad it.

Academic integrity policy

This repo is designed to be assistive, not deceptive. See POSITIONING.md for the full design philosophy. Contributors must not add features designed to evade AI detection tools. If unsure, open an issue to discuss before submitting a PR.

Credit

Contributors are credited in commit messages, CHANGELOG entries, and the Contributors section of the README. For significant contributions (new features, major reference files), we also add a mention in the relevant release notes.

License

By contributing, you agree that your contributions will be licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0. See POSITIONING.md for usage terms.

When adding a new skill

Read shared/ground_truth_isolation_pattern.md before writing the SKILL.md. It explains the three-layer model behind the data_access_level and task_type frontmatter fields and lists the do/don't rules for handling evaluation rubrics, gold labels, and answer keys.