domains / families / research / wp-literature-positioning
wp-literature-positioning
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Use when positioning a World Politics manuscript against the comparative-politics and international-relations literatures so it reads as a contribution that travels across cases. World Politics expects engagement with both theoretical and substantive literatures; the move is to locate the paper in a live cross-case debate, not a single-country conversation. Stakes the contribution; it does not write the lit review.
When to use
- Drafting or revising the introduction and contribution paragraph
- Addressing reviewer feedback about missing obvious work or not engaging the debate
- Connecting single-case literature to a general cross-case debate
- Distinguishing the contribution from the closest prior comparative or IR work
- Building a review article that synthesizes thematically related books
- Positioning a paper at the intersection of comparative politics and international relations
When not to use
- Writing the full literature review
- Designing the research methodology (hand off to wp-research-design)
- Building the theoretical framework (hand off to wp-theory-building)
- Handling submission anonymity issues (hand off to wp-submission)
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