Journal Club PPT — scientific paper → academic group-meeting slides

Journal Club PPT — scientific paper → academic group-meeting slides

This skill turns a scientific paper PDF into a claim-driven PPT for lab meeting, journal club, or 文献汇报. The deck must explain the paper's logic, not merely summarize sections or paste screenshots.

Default language: Chinese, with key technical terms preserved in English when helpful. Use another language only if the user asks.

Hard constraints

1. Read the argument before designing slides. Do not create a slide outline until you can state the paper's central question, knowledge gap, hypothesis, experimental/computational strategy, evidence chain, and final claim.
2. Include author introduction. At minimum: first author(s), corresponding/senior author(s), affiliations, research direction inferred from the paper, and why this team is relevant to the work. Use external sources only for text facts when available and appropriate; never import external images.
3. Include background introduction. Explain the field context as: broad problem → unresolved gap → why this paper matters → what question the paper asks.
4. Confirm a PPT outline before filling slides unless the user asked for a fully automatic final deck. The outline must be evidence-driven and include planned figure panels.
5. Use only figures from the PDF's main text/body. Do not use web images, stock images, AI-generated images, author photos, journal logos, graphical abstracts, supplementary figures, Extended Data, or figures from other papers unless the user explicitly overrides this constraint.
6. Select subfigures by logic. Crop and use only panels that support the narrative. Do not paste whole pages or dump every panel from every figure.
7. End with evaluation. The deck must discuss strengths, limitations, unanswered questions, and possible follow-up experiments/analyses.
8. Slide count is a hard quality gate. The final PPT must contain at least 10 and at most 30 slides, including title and conclusion/discussion slides. Use 10–12 slides for short papers, 14–18 for standard research articles, 19–24 for complex multi-omics or method-heavy papers, and 25–30 only when the paper genuinely needs it.

Wisp-specific workflow

Use Wisp's strengths rather than treating the PDF as static screenshots:

• Use PDF text extraction / pdf-explore-style helpers when available to read abstract, introduction, results, methods, discussion, captions, author information, and references.
• Use vision on rendered PDF pages to inspect figures, layouts, panel labels, legends, axes, scale bars, and multi-panel structure.
• Use Python to render PDF pages at high DPI, crop selected figure panels, name crops consistently, and build a figure ledger.
• Use Wisp's persistent Python runtime to keep intermediate objects: paper outline, figure inventory, selected crop paths, and slide plan.
• Use MCP/web/PubMed/ORCID/lab pages only for textual author/background verification when helpful. External visual assets remain forbidden.

Phase 1 — Paper logic reconstruction

Before touching the PPT, produce a compact internal paper_logic brief:

• Bibliographic identity: title, journal/preprint server, year, DOI if present, article type, field.
• Central problem: what biological/clinical/computational problem is being addressed?
• Knowledge gap: what prior uncertainty or technical bottleneck motivates the work?
• Main hypothesis or central claim: one sentence.
• System and data: organism/cell type/cohort/dataset/model, sample scale, intervention or comparison.
• Experimental/computational design: key assays, models, algorithms, controls, statistics.
• Evidence chain: ordered claims from Result 1 → Result 2 → Result N, each mapped to figure panels.
• Final conclusion: what becomes more believable after the paper?
• Scope boundary: what the paper does not prove.