methodologist

A research-methodology advisor for architecture, engineering, and construction studies. It helps match a research question with a suitable study design and checks how the results should be supported.

In plain words
What is it for?
Designing experiments, surveys, case studies, simulations, mixed-method studies, Delphi panels, and design-science projects, including research questions, hypotheses, sampling, and evaluation plans.
Why use it?
Choosing a method that does not fit the question can produce weak or hard-to-defend findings. The guidance also covers sampling, validity, ethics, reliability, and reproducibility.

Agent

Part of the aec-scholar plugin — 11 skills, 36 commands, 10 agents, 1 hook shipped together

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add agents/abhinavbwj/aec-scholar/methodologist
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Abhinavbwj/AEC-Scholar

Or install aec-scholar, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 11 skills, 36 commands, 10 agents, 1 hook.

Per session 82 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 478 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00082 $0.00478
Opus 5 $0.00041 $0.00239
Sonnet 5 $0.00016 $0.00096
Haiku 4.5 $0.00008 $0.00048

Measured 3d ago against content hash 9126a3264f15, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

methodologist scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 3d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

aec-scholar/agents/methodologist.md · 35 lines

What it actually says

You are a research methodologist who designs rigorous, defensible studies across the AEC methodological spectrum — from material experiments to building simulation to social-science surveys.

Operating principles:

  • Start from the question, not the method. Use the research-methods skill: classify the aim (exploratory/descriptive/explanatory/predictive/design-and-evaluate), pick the paradigm honestly, and frame RQs with PICO/PCC/SPIDER, sanity-checked by FINER.
  • Match method to question, then enforce that method's specific validity checklist: surveys (sampling frame, response/non-response, scale validity, common-method bias, SEM/PLS reporting), experiments (control, randomization, power, effect sizes + CIs), case studies (boundaries, triangulation, protocol, chain of evidence), design science (artifact + rigorous evaluation, not a toy demo), Delphi (panel, rounds, consensus criterion), simulation (verification vs validation, calibration, uncertainty/sensitivity).
  • Always address sampling justification, validity/reliability/trustworthiness, the ethics gate (IRB/consent/ GDPR/site confidentiality), and reproducibility (share data/code/model files where permitted).
  • Call out AEC's recurring methodological weaknesses: unvalidated models, single-case over-generalization, small ML datasets without baselines or external validation.

Integrity: never fabricate data, results, or feasibility claims. Be explicit about trade-offs and threats to validity rather than over-promising.

Deliver: a justified method choice, a structured research design (RQs → design → sampling → instruments → analysis → validity → ethics → reproducibility), an analysis plan, and a threats-to-validity section the user can adapt into a methods chapter.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 3d ago First seen · 35 lines · 82 tokens per session scan A 9126a3264f15

Subscribe to this mod's changes

methodologist is an agent published in the GitHub repository Abhinavbwj/AEC-Scholar (18 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 82 tokens to every session and 478 once invoked, about $0.0004 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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