brycewang-stanford/aer-literature

AER Literature

Overview

This skill does two jobs that AER referees grade separately:

1. Positioning — finding the closest predecessors, mapping what each did and missed, and choosing the value-added claim the paper can actually defend. A mispositioned paper draws the fatal report sentence "the authors appear unaware of [paper]."
2. Citation integrity — guaranteeing that every reference exists, says what the manuscript claims it says, and is cited to the right version.

The second job is non-negotiable for AI-assisted manuscripts. Language models produce plausible-looking citations that do not exist, attach real authors to invented titles, and attribute findings to papers that show the opposite. One hallucinated reference, found by a referee, destroys the credibility of every other sentence in the paper. The working rule:

No citation is written from memory. Every entry is verified against a fetched source before it enters the bibliography, and every claim about a paper is verified against that paper's actual text.

When to Use

• During aer-topic-selection, to run the novelty scan before committing
• Before aer-introduction, to build the antecedents paragraph
• When a referee names a missed paper and the positioning needs repair
• Before submission, as the bibliography verification pass (pairs with aer-consistency)

Search Protocol

Run all five channels — each finds papers the others miss:

1. Working-paper series: NBER, CEPR, IZA, SSRN, BFI. Top-5 competitors live here for 2-4 years before publication; the novelty threat is almost always an unpublished working paper, not a published article.
2. RePEc / IDEAS and Google Scholar, searching by question ("effect of X on Y"), by method-in-setting, and by dataset name. Dataset search catches the most dangerous neighbor: someone using the same data.
3. Forward citations of the two or three obvious antecedents — everyone who cited them since, sorted by recency.
4. Recent tables of contents: AER, QJE, JPE, Econometrica, ReStud, AEJ family, ReStat, JEEA — last 3-5 years, scanning titles in the subfield.
5. Handbook chapters and Journal of Economic Perspectives / Annual Review of Economics surveys for the field's own map of itself.

Log every search (channel, query, date, hits) — the log answers the referee who asks "did you know about X?" and feeds the novelty audit in aer-topic-selection.

The Antecedents Map

Reduce the search to the 3-6 closest papers and fill this table honestly — it is the skeleton of the introduction's antecedents paragraph and the evidence base for the contribution claim:

| Paper | Question | Data / setting | Identification | Headline finding | What it does not do | |---|---|---|---|---|---| | A (2019) | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... |

Rules:

• "What it does not do" must be a fact about the paper, not a slight. The introduction will say it in neutral language; referees include these authors.
• If the closest paper answers the same question with the same data and a defensible design, the contribution claim must change — return to aer-topic-selection rather than writing around the conflict.
• Verify each row against the paper's published version — abstracts and early working papers often differ from the final result.

Positioning Moves

The value-added paragraph claims one primary move (plus at most two supporting ones):

| Move | Defensible when | |---|---| | New question | No antecedent asks it — and it matters that nobody has | | New identification | Antecedents are correlational or use a now-rejected design | | New data | Resolution, coverage, or linkage the literature lacked | | New mechanism | The why was open even though the whether was settled | | Opposite / corrected finding | A credibly identified sign flip or magnitude revision | | Unification | Two literatures explained by one framework or fact |

Match the claim to the map: a "new identification" claim dies instantly if row 3 of the antecedents table already used the same design.

Citation Coverage Norms

• A full-length empirical AER paper typically carries 50-110 references; AER: Insights far fewer. Padding is as suspicious as thinness.
• Cite: every antecedent in the map; the primary source for every estimator and diagnostic (keys in docs/methods-reference.md, entries in references.bib); the source for every institutional fact and every benchmark magnitude used in Results.
• Do not cite: textbooks in place of original methods papers; surveys as stand-ins for the specific result being invoked; papers included only to flatter potential referees.
• Cite the published version wherever one exists. Citing the 2019 NBER version of a 2021 AER paper signals a stale literature review. Cite a working paper only when it is genuinely unpublished — and re-check its status at submission time.

Citation Integrity Protocol

Run this pipeline for every reference. No step is skippable for entries the model "remembers."

Step 1 — Existence

Verify against an authoritative record: resolve the DOI (Crossref / doi.org), or match the exact title and author list on the journal page, RePEc, or the NBER/SSRN abstract page. A reference with no resolvable DOI and no locatable landing page does not go in the bibliography. Use a web search or fetch for every entry; if a Zotero or reference-manager connection is available, import from the verified record rather than typing fields.

Step 2 — Field accuracy

Check, character by character, against the verified record: full author list and order, spelling and diacritics, year, exact title, journal, volume, issue, pages, DOI. The most common AI corruption modes: swapped coauthors, off-by-one years (working paper vs. publication), a real author pair attached to an invented title, and the wrong journal in the right family (AEJ: Applied vs. AEJ: Policy).

Step 3 — Claim accuracy

For every in-text sentence of the form "[Author (year)] find/show/argue X," read at least the abstract — and the relevant table if a magnitude is quoted. The claim must match what the paper actually establishes, including sign, population, and design caveats. Misattribution to a real paper is more damaging than a fake one, because the referee may be its author.

Step 4 — Status

Check that the paper has not been retracted or corrected, and whether a cited working paper has since been published (then cite the journal version). For replication-contested results, cite the dispute or choose a different benchmark.

Step 5 — Ledger

Maintain a verification ledger alongside references.bib:

KEY                  DOI-OK  FIELDS-OK  CLAIM-OK  VERSION      CHECKED
goodman_bacon_2021   yes     yes        yes       published    2026-06-12
hjort_poulsen_2019   yes     yes        yes       published    2026-06-12

Any row that cannot reach all-yes is removed from the manuscript or explicitly flagged to the user as unverified. Never silently keep an unverified citation.

BibTeX Hygiene

• One key convention, applied everywhere: author_author_year lowercase (matching references.bib in this repository).
• Every entry carries a DOI, or an explicit no-DOI note with a stable URL.
• No duplicate entries under variant keys; no fields invented to fill gaps.
• In-text citations compile against the bibliography with zero unresolved keys — aer-consistency runs this check as part of the full-manuscript audit.

Common Failure Modes

• A bibliography assembled from model memory and "cleaned up" afterward — verification is the assembly step, not a post-process
• The novelty scan run only on Google Scholar, missing the NBER working paper that scoops the contribution
• "X et al. (2020) show that..." where the paper suggests it in the discussion section
• Antecedents described from their abstracts, then misrepresented in the introduction's value-added contrast
• Citing five surveys to establish a fact one primary source established

Repository Resources

Bundled with the installed skill, no repository checkout needed --- read it before the repo resources below:

• references/citation-verification-protocol.md --- fetch-before-cite protocol, claim-audit table, BibTeX hygiene

When working from the AER-skills repository or plugin bundle, load only the relevant resource:

• Verified estimator and diagnostic citations with BibTeX keys: docs/methods-reference.md and references.bib
• Recent papers by subfield for positioning benchmarks: examples/modern-aer-exemplars.md
• Classic contribution archetypes: examples/aer-exemplars.md
• The novelty-audit questions this skill's search must answer: skills/aer-topic-selection/SKILL.md

Handoff

CLOSEST PAPERS MAPPED: <n> (target 3-6)
SCOOP RISK: <none found / named paper + implication>
POSITIONING MOVE: <new question | identification | data | mechanism | correction | unification>
REFERENCES VERIFIED: <n>/<total> (existence / fields / claim / version)
UNVERIFIED ENTRIES: <list, or "none — all verified">
NEXT SKILL: <aer-introduction | aer-topic-selection | aer-consistency>

Anti-Patterns

• Writing the antecedents paragraph before building the antecedents map
• Treating citation verification as a formatting task to do "at the end"
• Keeping a citation because it "is probably real" — probability is not the standard; a fetched record is
• Softening "what it does not do" into vagueness, leaving the value-added claim uncontrasted
• Citing the referee-bait paper without reading it — referees test exactly those sentences