Manuscript Lint - journal disclosure statements (COI, funding, AI use)

A manuscript is rejected before peer review more often for a missing paragraph than for a

For authors and lab managers: missing conflict-of-interest, funding or AI-use statements are a desk-reject reason at most journals. weak result. Editorial office staff work through a submission form that asks, one field at a time, for the statements that are supposed to already be in the file: data availability, funding with the award ID, competing interests, author contributions, ethics approval, consent, trial registration, ORCID, an open-access licence, and — since the ICMJE Recommendations were updated for generative AI — a declaration of whether an AI tool was used in the writing and for what. If one of them is absent the paper comes back unread, and the clock on the next issue starts again.

This extension reads the .tex or .md file you are editing and reports which of those statements are missing, thin, or out of date. It runs entirely on your machine: an unpublished manuscript never leaves the editor.

What it checks

16 rules, every one of them pointed at a line in your file:

That last rule is the one a chatbot gets wrong. Models trained before mid-2026 still describe the old 12-month window, and text written from that advice contradicts the policy the paper will actually be held to.

Using it

• Manuscript Disclosure Lint: Check this file — runs the 16 rules over the open document, marks the lines in the Problems panel, and prints a list with the wording to paste for each gap. This is the free part and it is not limited in any way.
• Manuscript Disclosure Lint: Sweep workspace and write report — runs the same 16 rules over every .tex and .md file in the folder and writes a dated manuscriptDisclosure-report.md you keep, hand to a co-author, or attach to a submission-readiness check for a whole thesis or a lab's back catalogue. That part asks for a licence key.
• Manuscript Disclosure Lint: Enter licence key — for the key.

A reference point

A manuscript formatting and compliance service quotes roughly $150-$400 per paper for the same read-through; a journal's own editorial office returns the file instead. The rule set here is the checklist, not the service.

Free online version

The same engine, byte for byte, runs in the browser at https://getreadystack.com/tools/manuscript-disclosure-lint — paste a manuscript, get the same findings, nothing uploaded.

Notes

Results are advisory. Journals differ, and a target journal's author guidelines always win over a general rule set. The 16 rules follow the ICMJE Recommendations, the CRediT standard (ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022), and the open-access conditions attached by NIH, UKRI, Plan S and Horizon Europe.

Licence: see LICENSE.txt.