nature-skills

A growing collection of Claude skills for producing academic work at Nature-journal standard — covering scientific figures, manuscript prose, and (in future releases) related tasks such as statistical reporting, peer-review responses, and methods writing.

Every skill in this collection shares a common philosophy: rules are derived from primary sources (published Nature papers, journal author guidelines, and structured writing curricula), not from general style intuition.

Skill index

| Skill | Status | Purpose | Trigger keywords | |-------|--------|---------|-----------------| | nature-figure | Stable | Publication-ready matplotlib figures | "Nature figure", "publication plot", "scientific figure" | | nature-polishing | Stable | Academic prose polishing to Nature style | "Nature style", "polish", "academic writing" |

Adding a new skill? Follow the contribution guide at the bottom of this file.

nature-figure

What it does — Generates multi-panel matplotlib figures that match Nature journal visual standards: correct typography, semantic colour palette, editable SVG output, and non-redundant panel information architecture.

Built from — Production scripts from papers published in Nature Machine Intelligence and top ML/bioinformatics venues (figures4papers).

Key rules enforced

• Three mandatory rcParams must always appear first:

  plt.rcParams['font.family'] = 'sans-serif'
  plt.rcParams['font.sans-serif'] = ['Arial', 'DejaVu Sans', 'Liberation Sans']
  plt.rcParams['svg.fonttype'] = 'none'   # text stays as  nodes, not paths
  

• Primary output is always .svg; .png at 300 dpi is a secondary raster preview.
• Multi-panel figures follow a three-level information hierarchy: overview → deviation → relationship. No two panels may answer the same scientific question.

Reference files

nature-figure/
├── README.md
├── SKILL.md
└── references/
    ├── api.md            PALETTE, helper signatures, validation rules
    ├── design-theory.md  Typography, layout, export policy, anti-redundancy rules
    ├── common-patterns.md Ultra-wide panels, legend axes, print-safe bars
    ├── tutorials.md      End-to-end walkthroughs (bars, trends, heatmaps)
    └── chart-types.md    Radar, 3D sphere, scatter, fill_between, log-scale

Supported chart types — Stacked bar, grouped bar, horizontal ablation bar, trend/line, sequential heatmap, diverging z-score heatmap, bubble scatter, radar/polar, 3D sphere illustration, fill-between area, log-scale bar, GridSpec multi-panel.

nature-polishing

What it does — Transforms academic draft text (including Chinese → English translation) into prose matching Nature journal conventions: ≤ 30-word sentences, section-aware tense and hedging, precise vocabulary, correct citation practice, and British English.

Built from — Close reading of f