Scientific Writing — Stage 2: Outline

Overview

Turn story.md into a bulleted outline whose every claim is backed — by a concrete repo artifact (results bullets) or a web-verified citation (background bullets). Multi-pass, modeled on superpowers:executing-plans. Outputs outline.md + references.md in the story dir.

Foundational rule: no bullet without backing. Inventing a citation or a number to fill a bullet is the cardinal failure of this stage.

Step 0 — confirm the venue

Ask the user the target journal/format (e.g. Nature/Science/Cell biological article; CS conference; BMC-style software article). This selects the section scaffold. Record the choice + rationale in the outline.md header. Common scaffolds:

• Nature/Cell biological: Abstract, Intro, Results, Discussion, Methods.
• BMC software article: Background, Implementation, Results, Conclusions.
• CS conference: Abstract, Intro, Related Work, Method, Experiments, Conclusion.