# 📝 JoF-250: Learning Scientific Writing Conventions from Pre-LLM Financial Research

UQO Working Paper No. 45 — A measured-convention writing engine for Claude Code, built from 276 Journal of Finance articles (2017–2020), with a preregistered evaluation

TL;DR — We parse 276 pre-ChatGPT Journal of Finance articles (vol. 72–75), annotate their rhetorical structure with a schema-validated LLM ontology, turn the train split into measured writing profiles (medians, IQRs, bootstrap CIs), index structural units for hybrid retrieval with provenance, and expose the result as a Claude Code writing/review/audit engine (/jof-write, /jof-review, /jof-audit, …). A preregistered held-out experiment compares five conditions (baseline → full engine) with a blind LLM judge and deterministic fidelity audits. See docs/DELIVERY_REPORT.md for measured results.

# 📌 Status

# 🎯 What this paper does

It asks whether abstract, domain-specific writing conventions extracted from a pre-LLM corpus improve LLM-assisted scholarly writing and review beyond strong prompting and conventional RAG, while preserving originality and factual fidelity. It delivers both the study and the tool (the JoF-250 Writing Engine), and the paper studies the tool.

# 🏆 Headline results

See docs/DELIVERY_REPORT.md and experiments/analysis/results_heldout_v1.json (generated from recorded runs only).

# 🗂 Repository layout

CLAUDE.md (mandate) · config/ · src/jof250/ · prompts/ · profiles/ · .claude/{commands,agents,skills} · experiments/{preregistration.md,protocols,fixtures,outputs,analysis} · paper/ · tests/ · scripts/ · docs/.

# 🚀 Quick start

uv venv --python 3.12 .venv && uv pip install --python .venv/bin/python -e ".[dev]"
cp .env.example .env   # API key file
make audit parse profiles index test
.venv/bin/jof250 write --paper /path/to/paper --section introduction --output /tmp/intro.tex
cd paper && make        # compiles main.pdf

# 📊 Data

277 PDFs under ~/Desktop/Journal-of-Finance-2018-2020 (UQO library access, 2026-11-03); 276 research documents included; metadata verified against Crossref. Derived full texts are private (docs/RIGHTS_AND_ETHICS.md).

# 🧪 Methodology

Phases 1–9 of CLAUDE.md; preregistration in experiments/preregistration.md; limitations in docs/LIMITATIONS.md.

# 📈 Figures & tables inventory

figures/ (regenerated by make profiles and scripts/05_analyze_benchmark.py), paper/tables/ (generated LaTeX fragments).

# ⚠️ Limitations

docs/LIMITATIONS.md.

# 📚 Citation

@techreport{boucher2026jof250,
  title  = {JoF-250: Learning Scientific Writing Conventions from Pre-LLM Financial Research},
  author = {Boucher, Simon-Pierre}, institution = {Université du Québec en Outaouais, Département des sciences administratives},
  type = {UQO Working Paper}, number = {45}, year = {2026}, month = {11}
}

# 👤 Author & contact

Simon-Pierre Boucher — simon-pierre.boucher@uqo.ca

# 📝 Notes

Folder named wp45-jof250 as required by the mandate; corpus scope amended to volumes 72–75 (A-002); global Claude Code install authorized by the author (A-003).