claim-evidence-chain

Claim-Evidence Chain

This skill encodes the argumentative discipline used to build sections. The unit of paper structure is the claim, not the paragraph or section.

The Three-Part Unit

Every claim in your outline / draft has THREE parts:

CLAIM:    The proposition you assert.
EVIDENCE: The specific data / citation / equation that supports it.
FUNCTION: Why this claim is HERE, in THIS section, in THIS order.

A claim with no FUNCTION is decoration — delete it. A claim with no EVIDENCE is hand-waving — find evidence or delete it. A claim with no CLAIM (just data) is a result without an argument — make the assertion explicit.

Claim Quality Checklist

For each claim, verify:

• Specific: Not "our method works well" but "our method achieves AUC X on task Y"
• Falsifiable: A reader could in principle disagree with it
• Bounded: The claim's scope is clear (don't overclaim)
• Non-redundant: Not stated elsewhere in the paper

Evidence Types and What They Can Support

Evidence Type	Can Support	Cannot Support
Single experiment	"X happened in this setting"	"X happens in general"
Ablation	"Component Y contributes to performance"	"Y is necessary in all settings"
Citation	"Prior work observed X"	"X is true"
Theoretical proof	"Under assumptions A, X holds"	"X holds in practice"
Visualization	Existence claims, qualitative trends	Quantitative magnitude
Statistical test	"Difference is unlikely under null"	"Effect is large/important"

Use this table to check whether the EVIDENCE actually supports the CLAIM. Mismatches are the #1 source of reviewer attacks.

Function Categories

A claim's FUNCTION in the narrative is one of:

1. Setup — establishes a definition or fact later claims will use
2. Motivation — argues for why the work matters
3. Result — reports a finding from the work itself
4. Interpretation — offers a reading of a result
5. Comparison — places the work relative to existing work
6. Limitation — bounds the scope of a result
7. Implication — extends from the result to broader consequences

Every claim should fit cleanly into one. A claim that doesn't fit is probably either misplaced or split-able.

Section-Level Patterns

IMRaD-style sections

• Introduction: Setup → Motivation → Comparison → Result-preview
• Method: Setup → (Setup → Setup → ...) — methods are usually pure setup chains
• Results: Result → Interpretation → Result → Interpretation → ...
• Discussion: Implication → Limitation → Implication → ...

Benchmark-paper sections

• Tasks/Metrics: Setup chain
• Baselines: Setup → Comparison
• Analysis: Result → Interpretation chains, often with load-bearing claims

Load-Bearing Claims

Mark claims that the entire paper depends on with [LOAD-BEARING]. Example:

"Our active-learning strategy outperforms random sampling on out-of-distribution tasks. [LOAD-BEARING]"

Load-bearing claims must:

• Be supported by the strongest evidence in the paper
• Be defensible against the most hostile reviewer reading
• Survive the Devil's Advocate Attack pass from peer-reviewer

A typical paper has 2-4 load-bearing claims. More than 6 means the argument is overloaded.

Anti-Patterns

• Claim laundering: Citing your own earlier section as evidence for a claim, in a way that creates circular support
• Bait-and-switch: Introduction promises X, paper actually shows X' (weaker version)
• Evidence padding: Stacking weak evidence to feel like strong evidence — three weak signals don't equal one strong signal
• Conclusion creep: Discussion section claims things stronger than the Results actually showed