apsr-literature-positioning — independently scanned and version-tracked by SaferSkills.
SaferSkills independently audited apsr-literature-positioning (Agent Skill) and scored it 100/100 (green). The audit ran 55 deterministic rules across Security, Supply Chain, Maintenance, Transparency, and Community; it found 0 high-severity and 0 lower-severity findings. The full rule-by-rule trace and per-finding evidence are below. Free, methodology-open.
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Every scanned point with the score it earned and what moved between them.
First recorded scan — no prior version to compare against.
The primary manifest — the file an agent reads to learn what this artifact does.
APSR's peer-review policy lists "failure to engage the relevant literature(s)" as an explicit desk-rejection ground. Positioning is therefore not throat-clearing — it is survival. The goal is to place the paper where a general political-science audience can see the gap and the move.
your paper speaks to. Cite the works that define it, including across subfields where relevant.
matters). The intro should make a comparativist care about an Americanist paper and vice versa.
under-theorized, or untested, and why resolving it advances the field.
show M fails / is conditional on C / is better explained by M′."
account and say how your design adjudicates it (hand off to apsr-research-design).
| If your paper is… | also engage… |
|---|---|
| an empirical test of an institutional claim | the formal/theoretical literature generating the claim |
| a country/region case | the general comparative theory it speaks to |
| a measurement contribution | the substantive literatures that will use the measure |
| normative/theoretical | the empirical work the argument bears on, where applicable |
apsr-submission)【Debate】the live disagreement / open question
【Key works】the 3-6 that define it (incl. cross-subfield)
【Gap】what is contested / mismeasured / untested
【Move】how this paper changes the debate
【Strongest rival】and how the design will adjudicate it
【Next】apsr-theory-buildingBecause APSR is the discipline's generalist flagship — the APSA/Cambridge venue read across American, comparative, IR, theory, and methods — "the relevant literature" is rarely just your home subfield's. The desk screen asks whether a non-specialist editor can see the debate; this table sets the depth that usually clears it.
| Paper type | Literature it must engage | The desk-reject trap to avoid |
|---|---|---|
| American-politics empirical | the general theory of representation/institutions it tests | citing only Americanists; "first to study district X" |
| Comparative case study | the cross-national theory the case speaks to | a country literature with no general claim |
| IR / formal | the substantive empirical work the model bears on | a model debate detached from political outcomes |
| Normative / political theory | the empirical or public-life stakes, where applicable | a purely internal exegesis with no discipline-wide payoff |
| Measurement / methods | the substantive literatures that will use the measure | method-for-its-own-sake with no consumer |
A hypothetical comparative paper argues that proportional electoral rules raise legislative responsiveness to minority preferences. Drafted for a comparative-politics audience, it cites 22 works, 19 of them on European party systems. An APSR-calibrated reframe keeps the core comparative cites but adds the representation debate Americanists own and the formal spatial-voting result the mechanism rests on — roughly 6 cross-subfield anchors — and re-states the gap as a contested general claim ("responsiveness is treated as institution-invariant; we show it is conditional on electoral rule"). The bibliography barely grows, but the contribution now reads as discipline-wide. (Counts illustrative.)
disagreement the whole discipline recognizes, and add the 3–6 cross-subfield works that define it.
APSR; map the live disagreement, then cite the works that constitute it, not a citation pile.
changes (mechanism fails / is conditional / is better explained).
double-anonymous (see apsr-submission).
subfield's frontier is structurally weak even when the within-subfield contribution is real.
empirical work, and vice versa — the bridge across traditions is itself a positioning asset.
current wording against the journal's submission and peer-review guidelines before relying on it.
../../resources/official-source-map.md — desk-rejection grounds incl. literature engagement~30 seconds. Free. No account. Every finding cites a rule and a line of evidence.