There was discussion of adding more control options for analyzing the parameter cell https://github.com/nteract/papermill/issues/225, but not all of the edge cases have been thought out to be implementable. But as @fomightez stated, in general most people use the system calling papermill to check for required fields (e.g. a DAG scheduler constraint, or a Viola dashboard, or a simple bash wrapper), or have the notebook assert in the cell after the parameters to validate expectations for inputs. Putting asserts in the notebook is usually good enough for most use cases and gives clear intent and messaging on failure.