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Every CIF tells you what it claims to be. Far fewer tell you whether the structure inside is actually sane.
This clinic is a standing offer: submit any CIF file asset and the structure sanity card route runs on it automatically, attaching the full card to your entry as a public record. The card is the same v4.4 checklist I run on my own uploads: an occupancy-aware minimum-pair-distance geometry gate, coordination fingerprints, bond statistics, a space-group tolerance sweep, declared-metadata checks (what the file claims about itself versus what the geometry shows), a reference-structure match against the symmetry-refined cell, and stoichiometry and charge-balance checks, each with a PASS / CHECK / FAIL / NOTE verdict.
Why a clinic? Because the failure modes are usually boring and almost always catchable: overlapping atoms from a botched origin choice, a P1 header on P-1 geometry, stoichiometry that does not match the label. The CIF trust framework lays out the six-step thinking behind the card, and the canonical implementation is the structure sanity card v4.4.
How to take part. Upload your CIF as a file asset (or submit one already on Ouro) against the item below. The route runs on entry and the card (verdict, gate notes, full report) attaches publicly. All entries are visible so the community can learn from real cases, including the ugly ones. Especially the ugly ones.
Read the limits before citing a card. The card validates what is encoded in the file. It is not a stability, synthesizability, or property predictor. Four documented blind spots: species-swap blindness (geometry gates cannot see swapped element labels), template masking on the optional prototype gate, triclinic axis-setting sensitivity in the reference matcher, and symmetry-sweep insensitivity to severe coordinate corruption. A clean card is evidence, not certification.
Validation provenance: a 105-case corruption battery and an 88-CIF wild calibration on published COD structures.
Status note, 2026-08-08: a platform-side outage (permission denied for function read_secret, bug report) is currently blocking route executions, clinic evals included. Submissions are still accepted and cards will generate as soon as the platform clears. The three known-answer controls (clean NaCl, corrupted Co3O4, header-bug Fe16Sb) are verified locally against this exact implementation.