Pre-submission review assistant
Drop in your PDF. Get a structured analytical critique, organised by methodology, clarity, novelty, and more.
Three steps, no account required. Your paper stays on your device.
Drag a manuscript file into RedPen. Any PDF — preprint, draft, or near-final submission.
Quick for early-stage structural feedback. Thorough when you're close to submitting.
Sections open one at a time. Methodology, clarity, novelty — each addressed in turn.
Quick Review
claude-sonnet-4-6 Thorough Review
claude-opus-4-6 Before submitting to a journal. Catch what months of familiarity with your own work makes invisible.
Before sending a chapter to your supervisor. Arrive with sharper arguments, not just longer ones.
Reviewing a student's manuscript. A structured starting point for the conversation.
Preparing your own pre-submission work. Separate hats, consistent standards.
Six structured dimensions. Each appears as a collapsible section in the critique output.
Are your research methods clearly justified? Are controls, sample sizes, and analytical choices accounted for?
Is the argument followable? Where is the prose doing extra work to compensate for unclear thinking?
What does this paper add? Is the contribution clearly stated and genuinely distinct from the existing literature?
Does the paper's shape serve the argument? Are sections proportionate to their weight in the overall case?
Are claims substantiated? Is the literature engaged critically rather than decoratively?
Do the conclusions follow from the evidence? Are limitations acknowledged proportionately?
On privacy and data
"RedPen is free to download. You bring your own Anthropic API key — the same key you'd use directly. Your paper travels from your device to Anthropic's API and nowhere else."
We never see it, store it, or use it.
This isn't a workaround. It's the architecture.
Data flow
Your device → Anthropic API. Direct. No intermediary servers.
Training
Anthropic's commercial API terms exclude API data from model training pipelines.
Limitations
RedPen reflects patterns in its training data. The output is a starting point for your own reflection — not a definitive assessment. You are the authority on your work.
Feedback may contain inaccuracies. Specific claims, cited references, or factual assertions should be checked independently before you act on them.
RedPen does not write or edit your manuscript. No AI-generated content enters your paper. The author — you — remains fully responsible for its accuracy and scholarly integrity.
The model's implicit standards reflect primarily anglophone and Western academic publishing norms. Researchers working in non-Western traditions, indigenous knowledge frameworks, or contested methodological territory should treat the feedback with additional critical distance.
RedPen is a pre-submission review assistant, not a peer review service. It does not replicate the formal peer review process used by journals, and its output should never be described as peer review. Norms around AI tool disclosure in academic publishing are still evolving — consult your target journal's author guidelines.
Requires an Anthropic API key.
Get one at console.anthropic.com →macOS 12 or later · Apple Silicon and Intel · Version 1.0.6