Manuscript Triage

The purpose of this page is to impose narrative discipline before manuscript drafting begins.

Paper Types

Paper type	Core question	What must be true	Common failure mode
Discovery paper	What new biological principle has been uncovered?	The paper can be summarized in one sentence without reference to tool building.	Too many side narratives dilute the main causal claim.
Technology paper	What new viral engineering capability has been created?	The capability is clearly new and not merely a better use of an existing method.	The draft spends more time on biology than on proving the capability.
Platform paper	What delivery problem is solved or meaningfully advanced?	Benchmarking, payload logic, tropism, or safety data make the practical advance hard to dismiss.	The study reads like a technical demonstration without a deployment argument.
Translational paper	What human-relevant disease or therapeutic path is unlocked?	The system is shown in a context editors can recognize as clinically meaningful.	The work never escapes proof of concept.

Internal Rules

Every project should have a one-sentence thesis before drafting begins.
Every manuscript should declare its likely journal class before figures are finalized.
Every paper should identify one modern anchor dataset or validation axis that makes the story feel complete for its intended venue.
miRNA logic should usually be presented as enabling circuitry unless the paper is specifically about the logic itself.

Atlas Integration

Each project page should eventually include a Manuscript Triage section specifying:

likely paper type;
one-sentence thesis;
primary figure logic;
required validation axis;
likely journal class;
narrative risks.