brycewang-stanford/paper-style

Paper Style

Overview

This skill adapts an existing academic paper (main.tex) to the house style of a target journal, focusing on two things:

1. Title — wording, length, case, and subtitle conventions.
2. Section structure — the section skeleton, heading case, numbering scheme, section count, and whether sections should be renamed, merged, split, or reordered.

The skill asks the user for the target journal first, before analyzing the paper, because the journal determines every subsequent judgment. It then proposes a complete restructuring plan, gets approval, and applies the changes to main.tex in place.

Scope discipline: This skill changes structure, not content. Body prose is never rewritten, except for minimal transition sentences where sections are merged (the opening sentence of a merged section must announce its combined contents). Empirical results, tables, figures, citations, and arguments are untouched.

Input: A project folder containing main.tex (plus tables/figures subfolders, ref.bib, possibly journal .sty/.bst files).

Output: Revised main.tex with journal-conforming title and section structure.

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Workflow

Phase 0: Target Journal

1. Receive folder path from user (via $ARGUMENTS or ask). Verify main.tex exists with Glob.

2. Check for Dropbox conflict copies before any editing: Glob for files matching *冲突副本* or *conflicted copy* in the project folder. If found, warn the user and stop until they resolve which version is canonical (concurrent Overleaf editing can silently revert edits).

3. Ask for the target journal — unless it was already given in $ARGUMENTS. Use AskUserQuestion with the most common targets as options plus free-form "Other":

   • Journal of Financial Economics (JFE)
   • Journal of Finance (JF)
   • Review of Financial Studies (RFS)
   • Management Science
   • (User selects "Other" to type any journal: AER, QJE, RAND, Research Policy, JIE, JCF, JBF, JAR/JAE/TAR, ...)

   Ask this before reading the paper. The journal choice drives the entire analysis.

Phase 1: Load the Journal's Style Profile

1. Read references/journal-profiles.md and locate the profile for the chosen journal. Each profile specifies: title conventions, numbering scheme, heading case, introduction treatment, canonical section skeleton, literature-review placement, hypothesis conventions, and typical section count.
2. If the journal is not in the reference file, derive a profile rather than guessing: a. Map it to the closest family in the reference file (e.g., any Elsevier economics/finance journal → JFE-family conventions; any AEA journal → AER-family). b. If the family is unclear, use WebSearch to pull the table of contents and 2–3 recent articles from the journal's latest issue, and extract: how titles are phrased, how sections are numbered and cased, whether a standalone literature review exists, and the typical skeleton. c. Present the derived profile to the user in one short paragraph for confirmation before proceeding.
3. Check the project for existing journal artifacts (e.g., jfe.bst, jfe.sty, ecta.cls): if style files for the target journal are already present, numbering and case may be partially handled by the class — note this and avoid fighting the style file.

Phase 2: Map the Current Paper

1. Read main.tex in full.
2. Extract the current state:
   • Title (\title{}), running head if any, abstract length, keywords/JEL.
   • The full section tree: every \section, \subsection, \subsubsection with its heading text and \label.
   • All in-text section references: \ref{sec:...} and any hardcoded "Section 5"-style mentions (Grep for Section~?\s*\d and Sections~?\s*\d). Hardcoded numbers will break under renumbering and must be tracked.
   • Appendix / Online Appendix boundaries (these are normally left untouched).

Phase 3: Propose the Restructuring Plan

Present one complete plan covering both deliverables, then get approval. Do not edit anything before approval.

3a. Title proposal

Offer the current title plus 2–3 candidates that conform to the journal's title conventions, with one-line rationales. Use AskUserQuestion so the user picks (options: keep current title — case-adjusted if needed — or one of the candidates; "Other" lets them type their own).

3b. Structure proposal

Present a mapping table:

现有结构 → 目标结构（JFE 风格）

| # | 现有章节 | 动作 | 目标章节 | 理由 |
|---|---------|------|---------|------|
| 1 | Introduction | 保留 | 1. Introduction | — |
| 2 | Rating Environment and Hypothesis Development | 改名 | 2. Institutional background | JFE 标题用 sentence case、短标题 |
| 6 | How Issuers Respond to a Downgrade | 改名 | 5. Mechanisms | 叙事式标题不符合 JFE 惯例 |
| 8 | Dynamics and Welfare Effects | 合并入 | 7. Additional analyses | JFE 偏好 6–8 节的紧凑结构 |
| 9 | Cross-Rater Evidence | 合并入 | 7. Additional analyses | 同上 |
...

章节数：10 → 8。受影响的交叉引用：3 处硬编码 "Section 9" 需更新。

Actions vocabulary: 保留 (keep), 改名 (rename), 合并 (merge), 拆分 (split), 移动 (reorder), 降级 (demote to subsection), 升级 (promote to section).

Explain why each change follows from the journal profile, not just what changes. Then use AskUserQuestion: approve the whole plan / adjust specific rows / cancel.

Fast path: if the user has said "直接改" / "无需确认" / "apply directly", skip the approval questions: pick the best title candidate yourself and apply the full plan.

Phase 4: Apply the Changes

Edit main.tex with the approved plan. Craft rules:

1. Title: update \title{} and any running-head command. Do not rename the folder or file.
2. Heading case conversion: when converting to sentence case, keep proper nouns and acronyms capitalized (ETF, Morningstar, China, DiD, IV). When converting to title case, follow standard title-case rules (lowercase short prepositions/articles).
3. Merging sections: convert the absorbed section's \section to \subsection (or fold its text in). Keep every \label intact — a dissolved section's label stays attached to the absorbed subsection so all \refs still resolve. Update the merged section's opening sentence to announce all the content it now covers. Remove \clearpage/\newpage commands that the merge has orphaned.
4. Splitting/reordering: move whole blocks verbatim (including their "Insert Table X about here" placement blocks, which always travel with their text). Never reorder paragraphs within a section.
5. Cross-references: after renumbering, fix every hardcoded "Section N" mention found in Phase 2 — preferably by converting it to Section~\ref{sec:...}; otherwise update the number.
6. Numbering scheme: section numbering (arabic vs. Roman, lettered subsections) is normally produced by the document class or .sty file. If the target journal's style file is present, rely on it. If not, do not hand-fake Roman numerals inside \section{} text; instead add the appropriate \renewcommand{\thesection}{...} lines in the preamble, and tell the user what was added.
7. Unnumbered introductions (JF/AER convention): use \section*{} plus manual TOC/label handling only if the user's template doesn't already handle it; mention the change explicitly.
8. Appendices and the Online Appendix: leave their internal structure untouched unless the plan explicitly includes them.

Phase 5: Report

1. Summary: title before/after; section tree before/after; count of renames/merges/cross-reference fixes.
2. Flag, don't fix: list any other journal-style mismatches noticed along the way (bibliography style mismatch, abstract over the journal's word limit, missing/extra keywords or JEL codes, table-note conventions) as suggestions for follow-up. These are out of scope for this skill — report them in 2–3 lines, do not change them.
3. Offer a consistency pass: re-read the edited regions to verify all \refs resolve, transitions at merge seams read naturally, and no duplicate section numbers exist.

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Writing Rules

• Communicate with the user in Chinese; all LaTeX content stays in English.
• Minimal diff: never rewrite prose while restructuring. The only new sentences allowed are merge-seam transitions.
• Preserve all \label{}, \ref{}, \cite{}/\citep{}, math, and table/figure environments exactly.
• Avoid the em-dash (---) in any newly written sentence (merge transitions, revised headings). Use a colon, comma, parentheses, or two sentences instead. Leave en-dashes (--) in ranges untouched.
• Never invent content: if the journal skeleton calls for a section the paper lacks (e.g., a formal model for RAND), flag the gap to the user instead of writing one.
• If the same heading change appears in multiple files (e.g., a standalone abstract.tex or chapter files via \input), apply it consistently across them.