The academic writing prompts elite AI labs actually use

What it does

This repository collects copy-paste prompt templates and agent skills for academic paper writing, sourced from working researchers at Microsoft Research Asia, ByteDance Seed, and Peking University. The prompts cover granular workflows—translating Chinese drafts into English LaTeX, stripping “AI flavor,” compressing paragraphs, or reviewing a paper from a reviewer perspective—each tuned for specific output formats like LaTeX source or Word documents. It is essentially a curated cookbook of system prompts meant to remove the drudgery of repetitive prompt engineering.

The interesting bit

The project treats prompt engineering as a “hidden resource” that advantages well-funded labs, and attempts to level the playing field by publishing vetted templates. The prompts are unusually specific about mechanical constraints—such as forbidding Markdown in Word outputs, escaping LaTeX special characters, or enforcing present-tense narration—to minimize post-processing cleanup.

Key highlights

• Distinct templates for LaTeX and Word workflows, with mechanical rules like escaping special characters or banning Markdown syntax.
• Prompts for removing “AI flavor”—mechanical connectives and generic phrasing that mark text as LLM-generated.
• End-to-end revision coverage: translation, polishing, logic checks, shortening, expansion, figure captions, and mock reviewer critique.
• Higher-level agent skills for automation beyond single-shot prompting.
• Sourced from active researchers at MSRA, ByteDance Seed, Shanghai AI Lab, PKU, USTC, and SJTU.

Caveats

• This is a prompt cookbook, not a runnable tool—expect markdown and instructions, not installable software.
• Most content is in Chinese and optimized for Chinese-to-English academic workflows.
• The README notes that agent skills require some configuration and have a learning curve.

Verdict

Grad students and bilingual AI researchers will save hours of prompt debugging. If you do not write research papers—or already have a private prompt library you trust—this is just a very popular markdown file.