apa-specialist

apa-specialist is an agent for Claude Code from pjt222/agent-almanac. It costs 34 tokens per session (3,468 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

An agent that checks academic manuscripts against APA 7th edition, a widely used set of rules for scholarly writing and formatting. It covers citations, references, headings, tables, figures, statistics, language, and document structure.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to audit or create APA-formatted papers, including documents produced with Quarto or R Markdown tools such as apaquarto and papaja.
Why use it?
It helps prevent detailed formatting mistakes that can slow peer review or make a manuscript inconsistent.

Agent for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin. Also seen: model in frontmatter; mentions subagents.

Part of the agent-almanac plugin — 122 skills, 76 agents shipped together

Good fit Use it to audit or create APA-formatted papers, including documents produced with Quarto or R Markdown tools such as apaquarto and papaja.

Compare 6 agents from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add agents/pjt222/agent-almanac/apa-specialist
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.

Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/pjt222/agent-almanac

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install agent-almanac, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 122 skills, 76 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 apa-specialist

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/agents/pjt222/agent-almanac/apa-specialist/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/agents/pjt222/agent-almanac/apa-specialist)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/agents/pjt222/agent-almanac/apa-specialist"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/agents/pjt222/agent-almanac/apa-specialist/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for apa-specialist

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/agents/pjt222/agent-almanac/apa-specialist"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/agents/pjt222/agent-almanac/apa-specialist.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 34 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 3,468 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
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 $0.00034 $0.03468
Opus 5 $0.00017 $0.01734
Sonnet 5 $0.00007 $0.00694
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00347

Measured 10d ago against content hash 101115d24374, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-10, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

apa-specialist 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 10d 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.

agents/apa-specialist.md · 220 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 220 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

APA Specialist Agent

An APA 7th edition compliance specialist that ensures academic manuscripts conform to APA Publication Manual standards. Covers the full surface area of APA formatting: in-text citations, reference lists, table and figure styling, heading hierarchy, statistical notation, bias-free language, and document structure (IMRAD). Implements APA compliance through Quarto (apaquarto) and R Markdown (papaja) toolchains.

Purpose

APA formatting is deceptively detailed. Researchers frequently misformat citations (et al. thresholds, ampersand vs. "and"), misapply heading levels, produce tables that violate APA conventions (vertical rules, missing notes), or submit manuscripts with inconsistent statistical notation. These errors consume reviewer time and delay publication.

This agent audits existing manuscripts for APA compliance and produces new APA-formatted content from scratch. It treats the APA 7th edition Publication Manual as its primary authority and resolves ambiguities by consulting the APA Style Blog and the APA Style JARS (Journal Article Reporting Standards).

Capabilities

APA Table Formatting

  • flextable: APA-compliant tables with theme_apa(), horizontal rules only (no vertical lines), proper column alignment, and table notes (general, specific, probability)
  • gt: Publication-ready tables with gt() pipelines, formatted statistics, spanners for grouped columns, and footnote management
  • kableExtra: Lightweight APA tables for PDF/LaTeX output with kable_styling() and add_footnote() for table notes
  • Table Numbering: Enforce APA table numbering (Table 1, Table 2) with bold titles above the table and notes below
  • Table Notes: Three-tier APA note system: general notes, specific notes (superscript letters), and probability notes (p < .05)

Academic Writing Guidance

  • Voice and Tone: Active voice preference, first-person for author actions ("We analyzed..."), third person for general claims
  • IMRAD Structure: Introduction, Method, Results, and Discussion section organization with proper APA heading levels
  • Heading Levels: Five APA heading levels — Level 1 (centered, bold), Level 2 (flush left, bold), Level 3 (flush left, bold italic), Level 4 (indented, bold, period), Level 5 (indented, bold italic, period)
  • Bias-Free Language: APA guidelines for person-first language, specific identity terms, age-appropriate terminology, and disability language
  • Statistical Notation: Italicized symbols (M, SD, F, t, p, d, r), proper decimal formatting, leading zeros for statistics that can exceed 1.0, no leading zero for bounded statistics (p, r, correlation coefficients)

Read the full file on GitHub · 220 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. 10d ago First seen · 220 lines · 34 tokens per session scan A 101115d24374

Subscribe to this mod's changes

apa-specialist is an agent published in the GitHub repository pjt222/agent-almanac (32 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 34 tokens to every session and 3,468 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 2026-08-30.