Get AI Peer Review for Scientific Manuscripts with Rigorous
Job to be done: Analyze scientific manuscripts for improvement before submission
🇳🇬 Ways to use this in Nigeria
Ideas to get you started, adapt to your situation.
- Student
Get AI feedback on your final year project (FYP) thesis or research paper before submitting it to your supervisor, ensuring your methodology and writing are top-notch.
- 9-5 employee
Improve a research paper for publication in a journal or conference, getting detailed AI feedback on scientific rigor and writing quality before submitting to co-authors or the editorial board.
What you’ll get
A detailed feedback report on your scientific paper before you submit it anywhere, the kind of critique a journal reviewer gives, but in a day instead of months. (“Peer review” is the expert-feedback step journals use to vet research.) Rigorous runs your paper past a set of specialized AI reviewers that check the methodology (how the study was done), the scientific rigor, and the writing, then hands you specific things to fix.
Tools you need
- Rigorous (free during testing): upload your paper, get back a review report. No setup.
Steps
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Open Rigorous: go to rigorous.company on your phone or computer. You should see the homepage with an upload option.
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Upload your manuscript: click the upload button and pick your paper as a PDF. Important: it must be a real, text-searchable PDF (exported from Word or LaTeX), not a scan of printed pages, the AI needs to read the actual text. You should see a confirmation that it uploaded.
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Wait for the report: the system runs your paper through its specialized AI reviewers. The author says this takes about 1 to 2 working days, and you usually get an email when it is ready.
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Download and apply the feedback: open the PDF report (from the site or the email link) and work through its suggestions on methodology, rigor, and writing, improving your paper before sending it to co-authors or a journal.
Original source
Based on the “AI Peer Reviewer” project by rjakob, shared on Hacker News, built to give researchers fast, AI-powered feedback on manuscripts instead of waiting on slow traditional review.
Notes & variations
- Free-tier alternative: the cloud version is free during testing. If you can code, a self-hosted version is on GitHub (github.com/robertjakob/rigorous); it gives full control but uses your own OpenAI API key, which costs money per run.
- Common pitfall: uploading a scanned image PDF. The reviewers cannot read it. Always use a text-based PDF from a document editor.
- Tip for better results: treat the AI feedback as a strong first pass, not the final word. Apply your own expertise, and if the tool lets you set custom criteria or a target journal, use that to tailor the review.