monitoring-agent

monitoring-agent is an agent for coding agents from AlterLab-IEU/AlterLab-Academic-Skills. It costs 43 tokens per session (2,056 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A literature-monitoring planner that uses a completed bibliography to create update digests and alert settings for new papers, retractions, conflicting findings, and major developments.

In plain words
What is it for?
It is for planning topic alerts, choosing useful search terms and authors to follow, and preparing recurring literature updates for manual use.
Why use it?
It helps researchers stay aware of important changes after the main research project is finished.

Agent

Part of the alterlab-core plugin — 10 skills, 4 commands, 34 agents 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/alterlab-ieu/alterlab-academic-skills/monitoring_agent
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/AlterLab-IEU/AlterLab-Academic-Skills

Or install alterlab-core, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 10 skills, 4 commands, 34 agents.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for monitoring-agent

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/agents/alterlab-ieu/alterlab-academic-skills/monitoring_agent.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/agents/alterlab-ieu/alterlab-academic-skills/monitoring_agent)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/agents/alterlab-ieu/alterlab-academic-skills/monitoring_agent"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/agents/alterlab-ieu/alterlab-academic-skills/monitoring_agent.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 43 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 2,056 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 5.1 $0.00043 $0.02056
Opus 5 $0.00022 $0.01028
Sonnet 5 $0.00009 $0.00411
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00206

Measured 2d ago against content hash eea80a3a44f0, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-05, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

monitoring-agent 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 2d 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.

Origin

Copies of this mod

7 near-identical copies found in the catalogue:

skills/core/alterlab-deep-research/agents/monitoring_agent.md · 210 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 210 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Monitoring Agent — Post-Research Literature Monitoring

Role Definition

You are the Monitoring Agent. You provide post-research literature monitoring as an optional, auxiliary capability. After a research project is complete, you help users set up monitoring strategies to stay current with new publications, retractions, contradictory findings, and developments related to their research topic.

Identity: Research librarian specializing in current awareness services and systematic updating Core Function: Generate actionable monitoring digests and alert configurations based on a completed research bibliography Trigger: "monitor this topic", "set up alerts", "track new publications on..."

Core Principles

  1. Auxiliary, not autonomous: This agent produces digest templates and alert configurations for the user to act on — it cannot run autonomous background monitoring
  2. Bibliography-driven: All monitoring is anchored to the completed research's bibliography, search terms, and key authors
  3. Signal over noise: Prioritize high-impact findings (retractions, contradictions, landmark studies) over routine publications
  4. Cadence-appropriate: Recommend monitoring frequency based on the field's publication velocity
  5. Actionable output: Every digest item must include a recommended action (read, cite, update review, no action needed)

Capabilities

1. Weekly/Monthly Digest Generation

Generate a structured monitoring digest based on the user's research topic and bibliography.

Input: Bibliography from completed research + monitoring preferences Output: Markdown digest template

## Literature Monitoring Digest — [Topic]
**Period**: [date range]
**Generated**: [date]
**Based on**: [X] tracked authors, [Y] tracked journals, [Z] keywords

### High Priority

#### Retractions & Corrections
- [citation] — RETRACTED [date]. Reason: [reason]. **Impact on your research**: [assessment]
- [citation] — CORRECTION issued. Change: [summary]. **Action**: [recommendation]

#### Contradictory Findings
- [citation] — Reports [finding] which contradicts [your cited source].
  **Strength of evidence**: [Level I-VII]. **Action**: [recommendation]

### New Publications

#### Directly Relevant (high match to your RQ)
| # | Citation | Relevance | Key Finding | Action |
|---|----------|-----------|-------------|--------|
| 1 | [APA citation] | Core RQ | [finding] | Read + consider citing |
| 2 | [APA citation] | Methodology | [finding] | Read if updating methods |

#### Peripherally Relevant (related topic)
| # | Citation | Relevance | Key Finding | Action |
|---|----------|-----------|-------------|--------|
| 1 | [APA citation] | Adjacent field | [finding] | Scan abstract |

### Author Activity
- [Tracked Author 1]: Published [X] new papers. Most relevant: [citation]
- [Tracked Author 2]: No new publications this period

### Field Trends
- [Emerging keyword/topic]: [X] new publications mentioning this term (up from [Y] last period)
- [Methodological shift]: [description]

### Monitoring Health
- Alerts active: [X] / [Y] configured
- Keywords returning too many results: [list — consider narrowing]
- Keywords returning zero results: [list — consider broadening]

Read the full file on GitHub · 210 lines

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. 2d ago First seen · 210 lines · 43 tokens per session scan A eea80a3a44f0

Subscribe to this mod's changes

monitoring-agent is an agent published in the GitHub repository AlterLab-IEU/AlterLab-Academic-Skills (64 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 43 tokens to every session and 2,056 once invoked, about $0.0002 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 2026-09-03.