Awesome Journal Skills is a collection of agent skill packs tailored to hundreds of academic journals across fields including economics, social science, medicine, science, and engineering. Researchers use the packs for tasks such as choosing topics, designing empirical strategies, preparing tables and figures, submitting papers, and responding to reviewers. The catalogue entries are the project's journal-specific skills and related plugins.
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.
npx skills add brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills --skill aeja-topic-selectiongit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-SkillsWrote 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.
[](https://agentmods.dev/skills/brycewang-stanford/awesome-journal-skills/aeja-topic-selection)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/brycewang-stanford/awesome-journal-skills/aeja-topic-selection"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/brycewang-stanford/awesome-journal-skills/aeja-topic-selection/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.
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/brycewang-stanford/awesome-journal-skills/aeja-topic-selection"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/brycewang-stanford/awesome-journal-skills/aeja-topic-selection.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>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.
| Model | Per session | Once invoked |
|---|---|---|
| Fable 5.1 | $0.00000 | $0.01219 |
| Opus 5.5 | $0.00000 | $0.00488 |
| Sonnet 5.5 | $0.00000 | $0.00244 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00000 | $0.00122 |
Grade A, and why
aeja-topic-selection 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 1mo 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.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 81 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Topic Selection & Venue Fit (aeja-topic-selection)
When to trigger
- A project is empirically promising but you are unsure it is "AEJ: Applied-shaped"
- The question reads like a policy evaluation, a field-specialist note, or a top-general-interest swing — and you need to place it
- Several possible framings of the same dataset exist and you must pick the one that lands here
- Reviewers (or a co-author) say "this is fine but why this journal?"
The AEJ: Applied fit test
AEJ: Applied wants empirical applied microeconomics where a credible causal research design answers a substantive economic question of broad applied-micro interest — above a pure field journal but more specialized than AER. Use this decision table to place the project.
| Signal in your project | Likely fit |
|---|---|
| Clean identification + a question labor/dev/health/ed/public economists all care about | AEJ: Applied (core) |
| Same design but the contribution is mainly a policy verdict / program ROI framing | lean AEJ: Economic Policy |
| Genuinely general-interest, agenda-setting, methodologically ambitious, long | aim AER first |
| Contribution is field-internal (only sub-field specialists will cite it) | a field journal (JHE / JOLE / JDE) |
| New estimator with a toy application | Econometrica / REStud / JoE, not AEJ: Applied |
AEJ: Applied is empirical-first: theory appears to interpret and discipline the estimate, not to lead. A descriptive or measurement paper can fit if the question is sharp and the measurement is the contribution — but it must not overclaim causality.
Sharpening the question (do this before writing anything)
- One-sentence question with the causal object named: "What is the effect of X on Y for population P, identified by design D?"
- Why broad applied-micro readers care — name two subfields beyond your own that should cite it.
- What the headline number will be (a magnitude with units, even if approximate) — if you cannot imagine the sentence "we find X raises Y by ___," the question is not yet AEJ: Applied-shaped.
- The credible-design seed — which design (RCT / DID / RD / IV / shift-share) makes the estimate believable; if none, the topic is not ready (route to
aeja-identification).
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.
- 1mo ago First seen · 81 lines · 0 tokens per session scan A f6f2ea535533
aeja-topic-selection is a skill published in the GitHub repository brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills (1,259 stars, last pushed 19d ago), licensed MIT. It costs nothing until one of its globs matches a file; then it loads 1,219 tokens. 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 2026-09-15.
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