deer-flow/skills/public/systematic-literature-review/templates/apa.md

APA 7th Edition Citation Template

Use this template when the user requests APA format, or when they do not specify a format. APA 7th is the default for social sciences and most CS journals outside of IEEE venues.

Citation Format Rules

In-text citations

• Single author: (Vaswani, 2017) or Vaswani (2017) showed that...
• Two authors: (Vaswani & Shazeer, 2017) — use & inside parentheses, "and" in running text.
• Three or more authors: (Vaswani et al., 2017) — use et al. from the first citation onward (APA 7th changed this from APA 6th).
• Multiple citations: (Vaswani et al., 2017; Devlin et al., 2018) — alphabetical order, separated by semicolons.

Reference list entry for arXiv preprints

arXiv papers are preprints, not formally published articles. Cite them as preprints with the arXiv identifier:

Author, A. A., Author, B. B., & Author, C. C. (Year). Title of the paper. arXiv. https://arxiv.org/abs/ARXIV_ID

Real example (from paper metadata {id: "1706.03762", title: "Attention Is All You Need", authors: ["Ashish Vaswani", "Noam Shazeer", "Niki Parmar", "Jakob Uszkoreit", "Llion Jones", "Aidan N. Gomez", "Łukasz Kaiser", "Illia Polosukhin"], published: "2017-06-12"}):

Vaswani, A., Shazeer, N., Parmar, N., Uszkoreit, J., Jones, L., Gomez, A. N., Kaiser, Ł., & Polosukhin, I. (2017). Attention is all you need. arXiv. https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762

Formatting rules:

• Author names: LastName, FirstInitial. (middle initial optional). Join with commas; last author gets an &.
• Year: the published field's year, in parentheses.
• Title: sentence case (only first word and proper nouns capitalized). Italicize titles in typeset output; in plain markdown, leave plain.
• Source: the literal word arXiv, then the full abs URL.
• No DOI unless the paper has also been published in a venue with a DOI. arXiv alone uses the URL.

Special cases

• Up to 20 authors: list all of them separated by commas, with & before the last.
• 21 or more authors: list the first 19, then ..., then the final author.
• No DOI and no URL: not possible for arXiv papers; always use the abs_url from the paper metadata.

Report Structure

Follow this structure verbatim when writing the SLR report body. Fill in content from your Phase 3 extraction and Phase 4 synthesis.

# Systematic Literature Review: <Topic>

**Date**: <YYYY-MM-DD>
**Papers surveyed**: <N>
**Scope**: <arXiv search query, category, time window>
**Citation format**: APA 7th edition

## Executive Summary

<3-5 sentences summarizing the state of the literature on this topic. What do the surveyed papers collectively tell us? What is the shape of the field? Avoid listing papers — synthesize.>

## Methodology

This review surveyed <N> arXiv papers retrieved on <YYYY-MM-DD> using the query `<query>`<, filtered to category <cat>><, published between <start_date> and <end_date>>. Papers were sorted by <relevance | submission date> and the top <N> were included. Metadata extraction (research question, methodology, key findings, limitations) was performed by language-model agents, with cross-paper synthesis performed by the lead agent.

**Limitations of this review**: arXiv preprints are not peer-reviewed; some included papers may not reflect their final published form. Coverage is limited to arXiv — papers published directly in venues without arXiv preprints are not represented.

## Themes

<3-6 thematic sections. Each theme is a recurring research direction, problem framing, or methodological approach across the surveyed papers.>

### Theme 1: <Theme name>

<2-4 paragraphs describing this theme. Cite papers inline as you discuss them, e.g. "Vaswani et al. (2017) introduced X, while subsequent work (Devlin et al., 2018; Liu et al., 2019) extended it to Y." Do not just list papers — describe the intellectual thread that connects them.>

### Theme 2: <Theme name>

<...>

## Convergences and Disagreements

**Convergences**: <findings that multiple papers agree on — e.g. "Most surveyed papers agree that X is necessary, citing evidence from Y and Z.">

**Disagreements**: <where papers reach different conclusions — e.g. "Vaswani et al. (2017) argue that X, while Dai et al. (2019) find the opposite under condition Y.">

## Gaps and Open Questions

<What the collective literature does not yet address. Pull from the "limitations" field of your Phase 3 extraction and identify patterns — if 5 papers all mention the same missing piece, that is a gap worth flagging.>

## Per-Paper Annotations

<One subsection per paper, ordered by year then first author. Each subsection is a mini-summary of that paper's contribution.>

### Vaswani et al. (2017)

**Research question**: <1 sentence from Phase 3 metadata>
**Methodology**: <1-2 sentences>
**Key findings**:
- <bullet>
- <bullet>
- <bullet>
**Limitations**: <1-2 sentences>

### <Next paper>

<...>

## References

<Alphabetical list by first author's last name, APA 7th format as described above.>

Devlin, J., Chang, M.-W., Lee, K., & Toutanova, K. (2018). BERT: Pre-training of deep bidirectional transformers for language understanding. arXiv. https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.04805

Vaswani, A., Shazeer, N., Parmar, N., Uszkoreit, J., Jones, L., Gomez, A. N., Kaiser, Ł., & Polosukhin, I. (2017). Attention is all you need. arXiv. https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762

<... more entries, one per paper ...>

Quality checks before finalizing

Before saving the report, verify:

• Every paper in the surveyed set appears both in "Per-Paper Annotations" and in "References".
• Every in-text citation matches a reference entry (no dangling citations).
• Authors are formatted LastName, FirstInitial. — not FirstName LastName.
• Years are in parentheses inline, and at the start of reference entries.
• Titles are in sentence case in references (only first word + proper nouns capitalized).
• arXiv URLs use the abs_url form (https://arxiv.org/abs/...), not pdf_url.
• References are alphabetized by first author's last name.