Research novelty review

Research Novelty Review

Quick start

1. Start skeptical: treat the contribution as incremental until the evidence says otherwise.
2. Decompose the claim into searchable units before looking at any literature.
3. Search strongest overlaps first, not flattering long-tail analogies.
4. Write down novelty-killing objections explicitly before giving any green light.
5. End with a 1-5 novelty decision rating, not a coarse ternary label, plus the narrowest defensible positioning.

Modes

Standalone mode

• Work from the user prompt plus any local notes, citations, or existing review artifacts.
• Do not require a suite root.
• Remain collaboration-friendly: if literature review or review-loop artifacts already exist, consume them; if broader retrieval or a second adversarial pass would materially help, recommend or invoke that workflow rather than staying artificially isolated.

Orchestrated mode

• Prefer the canonical directory ./novelty-review/.
• Read upstream context from research-brief.md, artifact-index.md, ./literature-review/, and ./zotero/ when present.
• Keep outputs legible to downstream experiment planning and paper planning.

Input contract

• Minimum: a concrete method, protocol, artifact, finding, or contribution claim.
• Prefer:
  • target venue or community
  • closest known prior work
  • scope of novelty under consideration
  • existing literature or review artifacts
  • existing Zotero library artifacts

Hard stops

• Stop if the proposed contribution is too vague to search.
• Stop if browsing or a usable corpus is unavailable.
• Stop if the claim bundles so many moving parts that a fair novelty comparison is impossible.
• In standalone mode, do not force suite initialization when a direct adversarial review will do.

Output contract

• Primary files:
  • novelty-report.md
  • prior-art-matrix.md
  • search-log.md
  • novelty-decision.json
• In orchestrated mode, these live under ./novelty-review/.
• In standalone mode, any target directory is valid.
• novelty-decision.json should capture the final 1-5 novelty rating, confidence rating, and the exact narrow positioning that survives the review.

Workflow

1) Decompose the claim before searching

• Write the contribution in one sentence.
• Split novelty into:
  • framing
  • method
  • evaluation protocol
  • artifact or dataset
  • empirical finding
• Reject blended claims that hide which part is allegedly new.

2) Search with a kill-shot mindset

• Use references/adversarial-query-patterns.md and references/search-log-template.md.
• If the user maintains a relevant Zotero library or collection, invoke research-zotero first or consume ./zotero/zotero-items.json as a curated seed corpus.
• Search the strongest plausible overlaps first.
• Prioritize recent literature and venue-appropriate sources before padding with weaker analogies.
• Log exact queries, filters, and what each search was trying to falsify.

3) Build the prior-art matrix

• Use references/prior-art-matrix-template.md.
• Record closest overlaps, not just vaguely related work.
• Score how much each prior work threatens the novelty claim on a 1-5 scale.
• Prefer concrete overlap dimensions over narrative hand-waving.

4) Write the objections first

• Use references/reviewer-objection-rubric.md and references/overlap-scoring-rubric.md.
• State the strongest objections a skeptical reviewer would raise.
• Flag renaming, recombination, routine scaling, and standard-bundle effects aggressively.
• If the novelty is weak but the usefulness is real, say so clearly.
• Keep the ratings explicit:
  • overlap threat rating: 1-5
  • surviving novelty strength: 1-5
  • confidence in the decision: 1-5

5) Decide and position narrowly

• Use references/decision-scale.md.
• End with:
  • novelty_decision_rating on a 1-5 scale
  • decision_confidence_rating on a 1-5 scale
• Offer the narrowest defensible positioning that survives the objections.
• Use this interpretation:
  • 1: abandon; the core claim is effectively killed by overlap
  • 2: major reframe required before proceeding
  • 3: narrow proceed only; some novelty survives but only under a sharply reduced claim
  • 4: proceed with careful positioning; novelty looks real but vulnerable
  • 5: strong novelty position; closest overlaps do not materially undercut the core claim
• If deeper retrieval would materially improve confidence, collaborate with research-systematic-literature-review.
• If a second adversarial pass would help and delegation is explicitly available and permitted, an independent review pass is allowed. Do not assume that permission.

References

• references/novelty-checklist.md
• references/prior-art-matrix-template.md
• references/search-log-template.md
• references/adversarial-query-patterns.md
• references/decision-scale.md
• references/overlap-scoring-rubric.md
• references/reviewer-objection-rubric.md
• references/tabmol-ddi-ood-adapter.md

Script

• scripts/init_novelty_pack.py: create novelty-report.md, prior-art-matrix.md, search-log.md, and novelty-decision.json in a standalone directory or the suite's novelty-review/ directory.