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rt-simulated-referee

Pre-submission peer-review rehearsal — a calibrated Associate Editor desk-screen plus 2-3 distinct-lens referees for the target venue, adversarially verified and synthesized into a report, decision band, and prioritized skill-mapped fix list.

Category: review
Field: general
License: MIT
Updated: 2026-07
Stages: referee-simulation

Simulated Referee (rt-simulated-referee)

Run the substantive gauntlet before a real referee does. Full protocol + a worked example: shared-resources/submission-readiness/simulated-referee.md.

When to trigger

  • After rt-submission-readiness clears the mechanical bar.
  • When the author wants to know the decisive objection before submitting.

Calibrate first (this is what makes it realistic)

Pull the venue's bar from the target pack, not generic intuition: acceptance/desk-reject reality + mechanics from resources/official-source-map.md; what this venue's referees attack from *-referee-strategy + the shared reviewer-objection-checklist; the fit/identification/robustness bar from the pack's skills. Set strictness to the venue's selectivity.

Protocol

  1. AE desk-screen — fit, general interest, fatal flaws → desk-reject risk; stop if a clear desk reject.
  2. Independent referees (distinct lenses: identification skeptic · contribution/fit · robustness/reproducibility) each write a structured report.
  3. Adversarial verification — every major concern must be real + specific + addressable or be downgraded.
  4. AE synthesis — one decision band (reject / major / minor / lean-accept) + the 1–3 decisive issues.
  5. Skill-mapped fix list — each decisive issue → the pack skill (and its execution bridge) that fixes it.

Orchestration

Spawn one subagent per role with the same manuscript + the calibrated venue bar; collect independent reports; a final AE-synthesis agent. Distinct lenses + independence catch more than a single read.

Hard rules

  1. Calibrate from the pack + source-map, never generic.
  2. Verify before reporting (real / specific / addressable).
  3. Map every decisive issue to a skill + execution bridge.
  4. It's a rehearsal — output a decision band and the decisive issues, never a fake accept probability.

Output format

Text Only
【Venue】… (calibrated)
【Desk-screen】send out / desk reject — reason; risk low/med/high
【Decision band】reject / major / minor / lean-accept
【Decisive issues (1–3)】each with owning pack skill + concrete fix
【Author action plan】ordered; tie each to a skill + tool

Next: address the decisive issues, then rt-response-to-referees for a real R&R.