PaperSync: Reconstructing Research Evolution for Evidence-Gated Incremental Manuscript Synchronization

Research projects evolve continuously, and scientific manuscripts should evolve incrementally alongside them. This requires tracing long-term changes across code, experiments, manuscript versions, and related literature, identifying affected claims, and applying only revisions supported by evidence. Existing workflows are largely snapshot-based: they update manuscripts from the current project state without modeling how that state emerged or whether detected changes justify textual revision. We formulate incremental manuscript synchronization as a selective revision problem under long-term research evolution. We introduce PaperSync, an evidence-grounded framework that reconstructs research evolution paths and produces localized, reviewable manuscript patches. A versioned research evolution graph links changes in project artifacts and literature context to manuscript claims. PaperSync separates impact tracing, which identifies content that may require revision, from evidence authorization, which determines whether a revision is justified. An evidence contract gates candidate revisions according to evidential scope, version compatibility, and unresolved conflicts. The resulting synchronization plan categorizes candidate actions as supported revisions, justified preservation, or deferred decisions and guides the generation and verification of minimal patches. We evaluate PaperSync using a benchmark protocol spanning controlled omissions, genuine version transitions, and no-change cases. The protocol measures whether systems identify affected claims, perform warranted updates, avoid unnecessary edits, and cover relevant synchronization decisions. PaperSync reframes manuscript maintenance as tracing research evolution and selectively propagating evidence-supported changes into the manuscript.