Journal Style Checker

Checks a manuscript against a target journal's author guidelines and only reformats the document with the author's explicit go-ahead. Never silently rewrites the paper.

Workflow

0. Identify the target journal and the manuscript

• If the user hasn't named one of the five journals, ask which one (Org Science, Management Science, AMJ, SMJ, ASQ) — don't guess for a submission-format task, since the five journals differ meaningfully on things like word/page limits, title-page blinding, and citation style.
• If a manuscript file hasn't been provided, ask for it. Use the appropriate skill to read it (docx skill for .docx, pdf-reading skill for PDFs — check /mnt/skills/public/ for these before proceeding). Don't assume a file is present just because the user references one; verify it's actually attached.

1. Get the current style guide

Each journal's guidelines live on the journal's own site and change over time — treat the references/<journal>.md file in this skill as a starting point / fallback, not ground truth. Always try to fetch the live source first:

1. web_fetch the primary URL listed in the relevant references/<journal>.md file.
2. If that page links out to a dedicated PDF style guide or a "Formatting Guidelines" sub-page, fetch that too — the landing page is often just an index.
3. If a fetch fails (paywall, login wall, dead link), fall back to the cached notes in the reference file and tell the user explicitly that you're using cached guidance as of the date noted there, since it may be stale.

Do not skip this step and rely purely on training-data memory of "what AMJ style usually looks like" — journal guidelines get revised (e.g., AMJ moved from Times Roman to Times New Roman with 1.5-spaced headings; ASQ periodically updates its Formatting Guidelines and AI-use policy). Pull the current version.

2. Extract what the manuscript actually does

Read through the manuscript and note, in the same categories the style guide covers (see the reference file's checklist for the journal-specific list), what the paper currently does — font, spacing, margins, heading structure, citation style, reference list format, abstract/keyword presence, title page and blinding, table/figure placement, word or page count, footnote/endnote use, etc.

3. Compare and report — do not edit yet

Produce a compliance table before touching the file:

Element	Journal requirement	Manuscript currently	Status
Font	...	...	✅ / ⚠️ / ❌

• ✅ Compliant
• ⚠️ Partially compliant / ambiguous (e.g., can't determine word count reliably, or the guide is vague)
• ❌ Non-compliant

Call out anything you couldn't verify from the document alone (e.g., blinding requires checking metadata/file properties, which you can note as a manual step if you can't inspect it) rather than guessing.

4. Ask before changing anything

After the report, ask the user whether they want you to bring the manuscript into compliance — and if so, whether that means all flagged items or only specific ones. This is a real fork in the workflow, not a rhetorical question, since some ❌ items (like cutting a paper down to a page limit) require judgment calls about content, not just formatting. Present it as a genuine choice, e.g.:

• Fix everything flagged
• Fix only formatting mechanics (font, spacing, margins, headings, references) and leave length/content decisions to the author
• Don't fix anything, just keep the report

5. Apply changes only after explicit confirmation

If the user confirms:

• For .docx files, use the docx skill to make the edits, preserving the author's actual prose — this is formatting, not rewriting. Don't touch wording, argument structure, or content beyond what's needed for compliance (e.g., trimming to a hard word limit is a content decision — flag it and let the author decide what to cut rather than cutting for them, unless they've explicitly asked you to).
• Keep a short changelog of what was changed, and re-state anything still outstanding that needs the author's own judgment (e.g., "still 800 words over the limit — you'll need to cut content; I only fixed formatting").
• Save the reformatted file to /mnt/user-data/outputs and present it with present_files.

Reference files

Each journal has known formatting particulars and a citation style worth knowing before you fetch the live page, so you know what to look for:

• references/org-science.md
• references/management-science.md
• references/amj.md
• references/smj.md
• references/asq.md

Read the relevant one before step 1.