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Your first paper with the CLI

In this tutorial you will bootstrap your first paper end-to-end with belico create-paper. You will see how the IMRaD scaffold is built, what each flag means, and how to continue toward the full pipeline.

Before you start

You need the stack installed and the CLI available (belico --help). If you don't have it yet, do Getting started first.

Step 1 — Understand the command

belico create-paper creates a new paper from a multi-institution template. Three flags are required:

Flag What it defines Valid values
--venue Target quartile Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4, Conference
--domain Scientific domain SHM, biomedical, hydraulics, structural, economics, environmental, geotechnical, materials, transportation, water, air, ...
--client Target institution UC, Scopus, SciELO, PUC, free (case-insensitive)

Useful optional flags:

Flag Effect
--output-dir DIR Target folder (default: articles/<auto-slug>/)
--briefing Invokes the intake_agent (lazy import)
--no-intake Explicitly skips intake
--dry-run Creates no files, only prints the summary
--lang es\|en Output language override

Step 2 — Rehearse with --dry-run

Before creating anything, rehearse to see the slug and path that would be generated:

belico create-paper --venue Q2 --domain biomedical --client free --dry-run

The CLI prints a table with venue, domain, client, the canonical slug (format <client>-YYYY-MM-<domain>-<venue>, e.g. continental-2026-05-shm-q1), and the target path. Without touching disk.

Step 3 — Create the paper

When you're happy, drop --dry-run:

belico create-paper --venue Q1 --domain SHM --client UC --output-dir ./my-paper

This creates:

  • metadata.yaml — venue, domain, client, slug, created_at, status: draft.
  • paper.md — IMRaD skeleton with header (Abstract, Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion, Conclusion, References).

How the client maps

Slugs are normalized: UC → continental, PUCP → puc. The institution profile filename matches config/institutions/<slug>.yaml.

Step 4 — (Optional) Intake with briefing

If you want the intake_agent to process a briefing on creation:

belico create-paper --venue Q3 --domain economics --client Scopus --briefing

The agent is imported lazily (only when you pass --briefing), preserving the CLI's fast boot.

Step 5 — Continue with the pipeline

Creating the paper is the scaffold phase. From here the full SDD pipeline kicks in (EXPLORE → PROPOSE → SPEC/DESIGN → TASKS → COMPUTE → IMPLEMENT → VERIFY → FINALIZE → ARCHIVE), which the orchestrator delegates to sub-agents.

The natural next step is verifying the draft once it has content:

belico verify --paper-id continental-2026-05-shm-q1

See also