jbes-literature-positioning

npx skills add brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills --skill jbes-literature-positioning --agent claude-code

Same command for any agent — swap --agent for codex, cursor, copilot.

# Literature Positioning (jbes-literature-positioning) ## When to trigger - A referee will ask "how is this different from method X already in the literature?" - The contribution relative to the closest existing estimator/test/algorithm is fuzzy - You are unsure whether your improvement is incremental or genuinely new - You need to map your method onto the right strand (time series, panel, GMM, ML, Bayesian, etc.) ## Why positioning is the methods-paper crux at JBES JBES referees are method experts: they judge a paper first by **what it adds to the existing toolkit**. Because the journal explicitly welcomes **adaptation of methods from machine learning and data science** alongside classical econometrics, your closest competitors may live in **two literatures at once** — the statistics/ML method you adapt *and* the econometric problem you apply it to. Position against **both**. The contribution must be stated as a delta against named prior methods, not as a freestanding survey: which assumptions you relax, which rates you improve, which computational barrier you remove, or which empirical setting prior methods cannot handle. ## Positioning protocol 1. **Name the incumbents.** List t