digest-paper

Digest Paper

Digest one paper end-to-end into sota/papers/<citekey>/. This is the atomic unit of SOTA work: it either completes fully or it does not happen. Never leave a partial digest.

Read First

• sota/README.md — synthesis format and digestion rules (the scaffold owns the format)
• references/bibliography-rules.md — citekeys, version resolution, cross-validation

MCP Preflight (hard gate)

Before anything else, probe the scholarly MCP servers with one trivial query each (e.g., search a known title). The gate is by capability, never by API key — a missing key only throttles, it never blocks:

• Required: arxiv (full text) must respond, AND at least one

bibliographic source — semantic-scholar, dblp, or openalex — must respond.

• If those required capabilities are unavailable: STOP, report which servers

failed, and ask the user to fix the MCP setup.

• If a reachable source is down but the gate is met, proceed and note the

reduced cross-check in the synthesis.

Never fall back to model memory, web search, or scraping. A citation exists only if an MCP lookup produced it.

Procedure

1. Resolve identity: from the given title/DOI/arXiv/PDF, find the paper via

semantic-scholar (and dblp for CS work). Ask the user only if the match is genuinely ambiguous.

1. Resolve the most authoritative version: published venue > latest arXiv

revision > other preprint, per references/bibliography-rules.md. Record both DOI and arXiv id when both exist.

1. Choose the citekey (<firstauthor><year><topicword>, lowercase) and

check it is unused: not in references.bib, no sota/papers/<citekey>/ folder.

1. Create sota/papers/<citekey>/ and fetch the full-text PDF as paper.pdf

through the fallback pipeline, most-authoritative/legal first: (1) arxiv MCP for arXiv papers; (2) otherwise paper-search, which falls back publisher/DOI open-access → Unpaywall → green-OA repositories (Europe PMC/PMC, CORE, OpenAIRE, Zenodo, HAL, SSRN, …) → Sci-Hub as the last resort. Record the resulting URL in metadata.yaml (pdf_source). The PDF is only the reading copy: the citation and the authoritative version always come from the scholarly MCPs (reconciled by DOI), never from where the PDF was fetched. If even the last resort yields nothing, stop, remove the folder, and record the candidate in sota/queue.md with decision unresolvable-via-mcp. Abstract-only digestion is forbidden.

1. Read the full paper — the PDF, cover to cover, not the abstract.
2. Write synthesis.md following the exact section order in

sota/README.md. Verify every exact number and quotation against the PDF.

1. Write the BibTeX entry into the SOTA section of references.bib, built

from MCP-sourced fields cross-checked per references/bibliography-rules.md. Never write a field from memory.

1. Fetch citations via semantic-scholar: outgoing references and incoming

citations. Select the relevant ones, not all. Write metadata.yaml with every field from the schema in sota/README.md, including the mandatory verified: block. Use citekeys for papers already in the SOTA, external ids otherwise.

1. Append the row to sota/index.md with status digested.
2. Add in-scope leads from cites/cited_by and the synthesis "Citation

leads" section to sota/queue.md as pending, with provenance.

1. Run make check from the project root and fix anything it reports.

Rules

• All-or-nothing: if any step cannot complete, revert the partial folder

and record the paper in queue.md instead.

• One paper = one folder = one bib entry = one index row (1:1:1).
• While digesting, the only edit allowed in other papers' folders is

upgrading an external id to a citekey in their cites/cited_by lists.

Done When

• sota/papers/<citekey>/ has paper.pdf, synthesis.md, metadata.yaml
• references.bib and sota/index.md each gained exactly one entry
• make check passes