conbio-literature-positioning

Literature Positioning (conbio-literature-positioning)

Conservation Biology rewards novelty and transferability, and reviewers screen hard for whether a paper actually advances the field. Positioning is therefore not throat-clearing — it places the work where a conservation audience spanning ecology, the social sciences, and practice can see the gap and the advance.

When to trigger

• Drafting or revising the introduction and the "contribution" paragraph
• A reviewer said you "missed key work" or "don't engage the relevant literature"
• Your taxon/system literature is solid but the paper doesn't connect to broader conservation science
• You need to distinguish your contribution from the closest prior papers

How Conservation Biology wants the literature engaged

1. Engage the conservation debate, not a citation pile. Identify the live problem, disagreement, or evidence gap your paper speaks to, and cite the works that define it — including foundational conservation-biology theory where relevant.
2. Two audiences at once. Satisfy system specialists (you know the frontier) and the general conservation reader (why it matters for biodiversity). An ecologist and a practitioner should both see the stakes.
3. Name the gap precisely. Not "little is known" — say what is contested, unmeasured, untested, or not yet translated into practice, and why resolving it matters for conservation.
4. Position as an advance. "Prior work assumes/shows X; we show it fails / is conditional on C / generalizes / translates into decision D."
5. Pre-empt the obvious objection. Reviewers are expert; name the strongest alternative explanation and say how your design adjudicates it (hand off to conbio-study-design).

Cross-disciplinary engagement (a distinctive demand)

If your paper is…	also engage…
an ecological field study	the conservation-decision or management literature it informs
a method/SDM/modeling advance	the substantive conservation problems that will use it
a human-dimensions / social study	the ecological stakes and the policy literature
a policy / practice analysis	the underlying evidence base on what works

Anti-patterns

• A "literature dump" with no organizing conservation problem
• Engaging only your taxon/system and ignoring conservation science broadly
• Strawmanning prior work, or hiding the closest competitor paper
• Self-citation that breaks anonymity (the journal is double-blind — see conbio-submission)
• Claiming "first to study" when the contribution is incremental

Positioning pass for Conservation Biology

Treat this skill as an executable review pass, not a prose hint. First lock the species/system threat, conservation decision, and uncertainty relevant to action; then judge whether the current manuscript answers the venue's real reader: conservation-science reviewers who ask whether evidence changes biodiversity, management, or policy action.

• Do the pass: Build a three-column map: incumbent conversation, unresolved tension, and this manuscript's delta; include one sibling-venue omission that would make a referee doubt the fit.
• Return a ledger: give claim / evidence / risk / manuscript location rows, so the next agent can edit rather than rediscover the issue.
• Sibling guard: compare against Biological Conservation for applied conservation breadth, Global Change Biology for climate/ecosystem process, Ecology Letters for theory-forward ecology; if a sibling owns the contribution, recommend re-routing before polishing format.
• Submission-ready gate: do not give final advice until the pack's resources/official-source-map.md has been checked for upload-week rules and the manuscript has one concrete fix for the largest venue-specific risk.

Output format

【Problem】the live conservation gap / disagreement
【Key works】the 3-6 that define it (incl. cross-disciplinary)
【Gap】what is contested / unmeasured / untranslated
【Advance】how this paper moves the field
【Strongest rival】and how the design will adjudicate it
【Next】conbio-study-design

Supplementary resources

• ../../resources/external_tools.md — synthesis tooling and conservation data sources
• ../../resources/official-source-map.md — scope, novelty, and transferability expectations