arpsych-topic-selection
Use when judging whether a psychology topic is mature, important, and synthesis-ready enough to warrant an Annual Review of Psychology (ARPsych) review. Tests topic fit; it does not pitch the topic to the Committee (arpsych-proposal-and-commissioning) or gather the literature (arpsych-literature-synthesis).
Profile →npx skills add brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills --skill arpsych-topic-selection --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.
# Topic Selection — Is This an ARPsych Topic? (arpsych-topic-selection) ## When to trigger - A user wants to write "a review" and needs to know whether ARPsych is the right home - An invitation is possible but the angle on the topic is undecided - The candidate topic feels either too narrow (one lab's program) or too vast (all of memory) - You must distinguish an ARPsych-scale survey from a *Psychological Bulletin* meta-analysis ## The three gates a topic must pass ARPsych commissions reviews that the **whole field** will read for a decade. A topic earns a slot only if it clears all three: | Gate | Question | Fails when | |------|----------|-----------| | **Maturity** | Is there enough accumulated, settled-enough work to synthesize? | The area is 3 papers old and moving weekly — premature; the review would date in a year | | **Importance** | Will cognitive/social/developmental/clinical/neuro/I-O readers and adjacent fields care? | The topic matters only to one specialty's insiders | | **Synthesis-readiness** | Is the literature fragmented in a way a framework could resolve? | The field is already tidy (a textbook chapter covers it) — nothing to add | A topic that is mature + import
- When to trigger
- The three gates a topic must pass
- Scoping the topic to the volume
- Sibling-venue triage (route away if mismatched)
- Checklist
- Anti-patterns
- Output format
What does the arpsych-topic-selection skill do?
Use when judging whether a psychology topic is mature, important, and synthesis-ready enough to warrant an Annual Review of Psychology (ARPsych) review. Tests topic fit; it does not pitch the topic to the Committee (arpsych-proposal-and-commissioning) or gather the literature (arpsych-literature-synthesis).
How do I install it?
Run `npx skills add brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills --skill arpsych-topic-selection --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.