prl-cover-letter
Use when writing the cover letter for a Physical Review Letters submission, which must justify to APS editors why the work meets PRL's importance-and-broad-interest criteria. Drafts the editorial case; does not edit the manuscript itself.
Profile →npx skills add brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills --skill prl-cover-letter --agent claude-code
Same command for any agent — swap --agent for codex, cursor, copilot.
Weekly change comes from our own snapshots, not the repository page — it measures attention, not adoption.
# PRL Cover Letter (prl-cover-letter) ## When to trigger - You are about to submit and need the cover letter - The editors will triage primarily on importance + broad interest, and you must make that case - A prior submission was declined on importance/breadth grounds and you are reframing - You need to suggest/oppose referees within the cover letter (coordinate with `prl-referee-strategy`) ## Purpose of the PRL cover letter The cover letter's central job is to convince an APS editor — who may not be a specialist in your exact subfield — that the Letter **clears the importance + broad-interest gate** and merits review at PRL rather than at a specialized Physical Review journal. It is the breadth argument that the editor uses to decide whether to send the paper out for review at all. It is not an abstract, not a summary, and not a place to oversell. It is a concise, specific, editor-facing case. ## Structure (concise, ~3–5 short paragraphs) 1. **Submission line** — title, that it is submitted as a Letter to PRL, and the appropriate subject area / editor track. 2. **The central result** — one or two sentences stating the single headline claim plainly, with the key number or qualitati
- When to trigger
- Purpose of the PRL cover letter
- Structure (concise, ~3–5 short paragraphs)
- The broad-interest paragraph (the load-bearing one)
- Checklist
- Anti-patterns
- Output format
What does the prl-cover-letter skill do?
Use when writing the cover letter for a Physical Review Letters submission, which must justify to APS editors why the work meets PRL's importance-and-broad-interest criteria. Drafts the editorial case; does not edit the manuscript itself.
How do I install it?
Run `npx skills add brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills --skill prl-cover-letter --agent claude-code` — it drops the skill into your project so the agent can pick it up. Swap the --agent value for codex, cursor or copilot if you use one of those.
Where does this skill come from?
From brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills, a repository with 909 stars. We read it straight from the repository tree rather than a submitted listing, so what you see here is what is actually published.
Is a popular skill a good skill?
Not necessarily. Stars measure attention, not adoption — a repository can trend for a week and be abandoned. That is why we show the weekly change from our own snapshots next to the total, instead of a single flattering number.