worlddev-topic-selection
Use when deciding whether a development question fits World Development (WD) and which sibling journal it really belongs to. Tests scope, relevance, and outlet fit; it does not invent evidence or citations.
Profile →npx skills add brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills --skill worlddev-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 (worlddev-topic-selection) ## When to trigger - A development paper exists but it is unclear whether WD or a sibling (JDE, WBER, JDS, EDCC) is the right home - A reviewer or coauthor says the question is "interesting but not development" or "too narrow / too local" - The paper is methodologically strong but its **real-world development stakes** are implicit - The contribution is a clean estimate with no obvious audience beyond the method's specialists - A qualitative or single-country study needs to argue why it travels beyond its case ## What WD actually selects for WD is a **multidisciplinary** journal. The desk-screen question is not "is the identification clean?" but **"does this advance how we understand or improve development in low- and middle-income contexts, and will a multidisciplinary readership care?"** Three things must be present, in roughly this order: 1. **A development problem that matters** — poverty, inequality, livelihoods, institutions, governance, aid/NGOs, food and agriculture, health, education, conflict, gender, environment-development. Stated as a problem in the world, not as a gap in a model. 2. **A defensible way of learning about it**
- When to trigger
- What WD actually selects for
- Is this WD, or a sibling? A boundary table
- A worked selection (illustrative)
- Five screening questions before you commit
- Checklist
- Anti-patterns
- Output format
What does the worlddev-topic-selection skill do?
Use when deciding whether a development question fits World Development (WD) and which sibling journal it really belongs to. Tests scope, relevance, and outlet fit; it does not invent evidence or citations.
How do I install it?
Run `npx skills add brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills --skill worlddev-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 984 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.