cover-letter-writer

cover-letter-writer is a skill for Claude Code from muhammad1438/academic-writer-skills. It costs 0 tokens per session (2,311 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A writing guide for cover letters sent with research papers to journal editors. It helps explain what the manuscript is, why it fits the journal, why it matters, and whether it is ethically sound.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to prepare journal cover letters, presubmission inquiries, and replies to invitations to submit a manuscript.
Why use it?
It helps authors write a focused submission letter instead of repeating the paper's abstract. It also addresses the questions editors use when deciding whether to send a paper for peer review.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the academic-writer plugin — 27 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it to prepare journal cover letters, presubmission inquiries, and replies to invitations to submit a manuscript.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/muhammad1438/academic-writer-skills/cover-letter-writer
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.

Any agent
npx skills add muhammad1438/academic-writer-skills --skill cover-letter-writer
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/muhammad1438/academic-writer-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install academic-writer, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 27 skills.

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 cover-letter-writer

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/muhammad1438/academic-writer-skills/cover-letter-writer/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/muhammad1438/academic-writer-skills/cover-letter-writer)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/muhammad1438/academic-writer-skills/cover-letter-writer"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/muhammad1438/academic-writer-skills/cover-letter-writer/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 cover-letter-writer

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/muhammad1438/academic-writer-skills/cover-letter-writer"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/muhammad1438/academic-writer-skills/cover-letter-writer.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 0 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,311 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 $0.00000 $0.02311
Opus 5 $0.00000 $0.01156
Sonnet 5 $0.00000 $0.00462
Haiku 4.5 $0.00000 $0.00231

Measured 12d ago against content hash 3cb70aadd031, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

cover-letter-writer 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 12d 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.

skills/cover-letter-writer/SKILL.md · 271 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 271 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Cover Letter Writer

The cover letter is your manuscript's first impression on the editor. It is a persuasive document that must convince the editor to send your paper for peer review — not a restatement of your abstract.


What Editors Look For

Editors read cover letters to answer three questions:

  1. Is this paper in scope? — Does it fit the journal's mission and readership?
  2. Is it novel and significant? — Does it advance the field meaningfully?
  3. Is it ethically sound? — Are there conflicts of interest, prior presentations, or related submissions?

A good cover letter addresses all three in under one page.


The Universal 5-Paragraph Model

Paragraph 1: Hook + Identification

Purpose: Capture attention and identify the manuscript.

Elements:

  • Journal name (proves you've targeted the submission)
  • Manuscript type (research article, review, case report)
  • Title
  • Why this topic matters now (the hook)

Example:

Dear Dr. Smith,

We are pleased to submit our manuscript, "Gut Microbiome Alterations in Early-Stage Alzheimer's Disease: A Prospective Cohort Study," for consideration as a Research Article in Nature Medicine. With 50 million people affected by dementia worldwide and no disease-modifying treatments available, understanding modifiable risk factors has never been more urgent.

Paragraph 2: Novelty and Significance

Purpose: Demonstrate why your paper deserves peer review.

Elements:

  • What gap does it fill?
  • What is new compared to existing literature?
  • What are the key findings?
  • Why do they matter?

Do NOT repeat the abstract. Instead, narrate the significance.

Example:

Our study addresses a critical gap: while late-stage Alzheimer's pathology is well-characterised, the gut-brain axis in the preclinical phase remains poorly understood. In a cohort of 200 cognitively normal adults followed for 5 years, we identified specific microbial signatures that predicted conversion to mild cognitive impairment with 78% accuracy. These findings suggest that microbiome modulation could be a viable early intervention strategy — a hypothesis testable in clinical trials.

Read the full file on GitHub · 271 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. 12d ago First seen · 271 lines · 0 tokens per session scan A 3cb70aadd031

Subscribe to this mod's changes

cover-letter-writer is a skill published in the GitHub repository muhammad1438/academic-writer-skills (6 stars, last pushed 5mo ago), licensed MIT. It costs nothing until one of its globs matches a file; then it loads 2,311 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 2026-08-31.

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