aer-literature

name	aer-literature
description	Use when positioning a manuscript against the existing economics literature, building the antecedents map for the introduction, deciding what to cite, or verifying that every reference in the bibliography is real, correctly attributed, and cited to the published version. Apply at topic selection for the novelty scan and again before drafting the introduction.

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 Top-5 competitors live here for 2-4 years before publication; the novelty threat is almost always an unpublished working paper, not a published article.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

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