ajps-literature-positioning
Use when positioning an American Journal of Political Science (AJPS) manuscript against the literature. AJPS is double-blind, so positioning must engage the relevant debates while keeping the manuscript fully anonymized (third-person self-citation, no first-person "we showed"). Stakes the contribution; it does not write the lit review.
Profile →npx skills add brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills --skill ajps-literature-positioning --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.
# Literature Positioning (ajps-literature-positioning) At AJPS the introduction must do two things at once: place the paper inside a **live empirical or theoretical debate** that a broad political-science readership recognizes, **and** stay consistent with **double-blind** review. The second constraint is easy to break — a single "as we demonstrated in our 2021 paper" can identify the authors. Positioning is where the contribution is staked and where anonymity is most often lost. ## When to trigger - Drafting or revising the introduction and the "contribution" paragraph - A reviewer said you "missed obvious work" or "don't engage the debate" - Distinguishing your contribution from the closest prior papers - Checking that self-citations are anonymized for double-blind review ## How AJPS wants the literature engaged 1. **Engage a debate, not a citation pile.** Name the live disagreement, the contested estimate, or the open mechanism your paper speaks to, and cite the works that *define* it. 2. **Locate the marginal contribution precisely.** "Prior work estimates effect E assuming A; we relax A / identify E cleanly / show E is conditional on C." A generalist reader should see the incr
- When to trigger
- How AJPS wants the literature engaged
- Keep positioning double-blind (an AJPS-specific demand)
- Anti-patterns
- Worked micro-example (illustrative)
- Referee-pushback patterns and the venue-specific fix
- Positioning pass for American Journal of Political Science
- Output format
- Supplementary resources
What does the ajps-literature-positioning skill do?
Use when positioning an American Journal of Political Science (AJPS) manuscript against the literature. AJPS is double-blind, so positioning must engage the relevant debates while keeping the manuscript fully anonymized (third-person self-citation, no first-person "we showed"). Stakes the contribution; it does not write the lit review.
How do I install it?
Run `npx skills add brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills --skill ajps-literature-positioning --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.