sciwrite-lint: Verification Infrastructure for the Age of Science Vibe-Writing

TL;DR

sciwrite-lint is an open-source tool that verifies scientific manuscripts by checking references, supporting claims, and assessing reliability, aiming to improve quality assurance in science.

Contribution

it introduces a novel, fully local verification pipeline and a new SciLint Score combining integrity and contribution assessments based on philosophy of science.

Findings

the pipeline successfully verified references in 30 unseen papers

error injection and false positive analysis demonstrate robustness

the SciLint Score operationalizes scientific argument frameworks

Abstract

Science currently offers two options for quality assurance, both inadequate. Journal gatekeeping claims to verify both integrity and contribution, but actually measures prestige: peer review is slow, biased, and misses fabricated citations even at top venues. Open science provides no quality assurance at all: the only filter between AI-generated text and the public record is the author's integrity. AI-assisted writing makes both worse by producing more papers faster than either system can absorb. We propose a third option: measure the paper itself. sciwrite-lint (pip install sciwrite-lint) is an open-source linter for scientific manuscripts that runs entirely on the researcher's machine (free public databases, a single consumer GPU, and open-weights models) with no manuscripts sent to external services. The pipeline verifies that references exist, checks retraction status, compares metadata against canonical records, downloads and parses cited papers, verifies that they support the claims made about them, and follows one level further to check cited papers' own bibliographies. Each reference receives a per-reference reliability score aggregating all verification signals. We evaluate the pipeline on 30 unseen papers from arXiv and bioRxiv with error injection and LLM-adjudicated false positive analysis. As an experimental extension, we propose SciLint Score, combining integrity verification with a contribution component that operationalizes five frameworks from philosophy of science (Popper, Lakatos, Kitcher, Laudan, Mayo) into computable structural properties of scientific arguments. The integrity component is the core of the tool and is evaluated in this paper; the contribution component is released as experimental code for community development.