Positions a World Development manuscript's contribution across the multidisciplinary development literature by sharpening the gap and claim. Helps when an intro cites only one discipline or when a contribution is framed as a first study with no conceptual payoff.
How this skill is triggered — by the user, by Claude, or both
Slash command
/world-development-skills:worlddev-literature-positioningThe summary Claude sees in its skill listing — used to decide when to auto-load this skill
- The intro cites only one disciplinary literature (e.g. only development economics) for a problem that spans several
WD readers come from economics, political science, sociology, anthropology, geography, public health, and practice. Positioning that satisfies only one of these communities reads as parochial to the rest. The strongest WD intros do three things:
| Rung | What it claims | WD verdict |
|---|---|---|
| Replication / context transfer | "X holds (or fails) in a new context" | Publishable only if the context teaches something general about why |
| New evidence on a contested mechanism | "The effect runs through institutions, not income" | Strong WD contribution |
| New measurement / concept | "We operationalize livelihood resilience and show it predicts…" | Strong, if the concept travels |
| Reframing / synthesis | "These contradictory findings reconcile once we distinguish…" | Strong, high-risk; needs breadth |
| Pure method | "A better estimator for…" | Reroute to JDE; WD wants the development payoff |
Position one rung up from where a skeptic would place you, and defend that rung — not two rungs up.
For qualitative or mixed work, "the gap" is rarely a missing coefficient. It is usually an unexamined mechanism, an untheorized context, or a contradiction in the existing record. Position against the interpretive literature: whose account does your evidence revise, extend, or complicate? A mixed-methods paper should state what the qualitative strand explains that the quantitative strand cannot, and vice versa — that integration is the contribution.
A draft on decentralization and water access opens: "Few studies examine decentralization in [country]." That is a site-novelty claim — the weakest rung. The WD rewrite engages the conversation: the economics literature finds decentralization improves service delivery; the political-science literature finds it can be captured by local elites; these conflict. The paper's contribution becomes the reconciliation — "decentralization improves water access only where local elections are competitive enough to discipline elites" — cited against both literatures, with the bridging mechanism (political competition) named explicitly. The same evidence now reframes a contested debate instead of merely adding a data point.
WD's practitioner readership knows the World Bank, UNDP, FAO, and major NGO evidence base. A positioning that ignores a well-known Bank report or systematic review on the same question reads as out of touch — even if the academic citations are impeccable. Engage the grey literature where it frames the policy debate, and show what your study adds beyond it (rigor, mechanism, contrary finding, or context). Do not, however, treat grey-literature claims as peer-reviewed evidence; cite them as the policy conversation, not as established fact.
【Journal】World Development (WD)
【Skill】worlddev-literature-positioning
【Verdict】positioned / under-claimed / over-claimed
【Marginal claim】one sentence, non-specialist-legible
【Contribution rung】replication / mechanism / measurement / reframing
【Cross-field bridges】which adjacent literatures are engaged and why
【Sibling boundary】how the claim differs from JDE / WBER / JDS / EDCC work
【Source status】verified URL / 待核实 / not asserted
【Next skill】worlddev-identification
npx claudepluginhub brycewang-stanford/awesome-journal-skills --plugin world-development-skillsPositions a manuscript's contribution against the frontier of development economics literature for Journal of Development Economics submissions.
Positions a contribution for The World Bank Economic Review by sharpening the gap and boundary claims against sibling development journals.
Routes manuscript work for World Development submissions by selecting the appropriate sub-skill based on current stage (scope, identification, writing, etc.).