SKILL.md
Figure and Table Auditor
Heritage and scope
This is an original Open Science Skills workflow for manuscript QA. It remixes general figure/table and citation-compliance ideas from Cheng-I Wu's Academic Research Skills for Claude Code (CC BY-NC 4.0), but is rewritten for open-science social-science manuscripts. It is not a visual hallucination engine: when a claim requires reading plotted values from an image, prefer source data or mark the issue as needing author verification.
This is the end-stage auditor. For figure design and production guidance during drafting, use the figures skill; for table design, use the tables skill. Run figure-table-audit once the figure and table set is stable and you are preparing for submission.
Instructions
1. Orient before auditing
Identify:
- Manuscript source and compiled output, if any.
- Figure directory, table files, appendix/SI files, and build command.
- Target journal or style guide.
- Whether figures are generated from code, manually edited, or exported from software.
- Whether source data for figures/tables are available.
If only a PDF is available, state that cross-reference and value checks are lower confidence.
2. Inventory figures and tables
Build an inventory with:
- Figure/table number or label.
- File path or source location.
- Caption/title.
- First in-text callout.
- Appendix/SI location if applicable.
- Producing script or data source, if visible.
Check:
- Every in-text callout resolves to an existing figure/table.
- Every figure/table is called out in text before or near appearance.
- Numbering is gap-free and not duplicated.
- Main-text and SI labels do not collide.
- LaTeX/Markdown references compile without unresolved labels.