| name | jel-comprehensiveness-and-balance |
| description | Use when calibrating completeness vs. selectivity and ensuring fairness across schools, authors, and controversies in a Journal of Economic Literature (JEL) survey — including not over-promoting the author's own work. Audits coverage and even-handedness; it does not design the framework (jel-organizing-framework) or write prose (jel-writing-style). |
Comprehensiveness & Balance (jel-comprehensiveness-and-balance)
When to trigger
- The framework is set and you are filling cells with the literature
- You are unsure whether to cite everything or curate
- The field has rival schools, a live controversy, or conflicting empirical results
- You are a contributor to this literature and worry the survey tilts toward your own work
Completeness vs. selectivity: the JEL contract
A JEL survey must be comprehensive in coverage yet selective in emphasis. The reader should trust that nothing important is missing, while the prose foregrounds what matters. Resolve the tension by tiering the corpus:
| Tier | Treatment |
|---|
| Foundational / field-defining | discussed in the text, with what they established and their limits |
| Important contributions | grouped and weighed within the framework's cells; cited with their finding |
| Confirmatory / incremental | cited in clusters ("see also …") to demonstrate coverage without bloating prose |
| Tangential | cited only where they bear on a specific claim; not every adjacent paper belongs |
Comprehensiveness is proven by the citation set (the saturation log from jel-literature-synthesis); selectivity is exercised in the prose. A survey that discusses every paper at equal length has abdicated the editorial judgment that is its value.
Fairness across schools, authors, and findings
JEL is the survey of record: its account of a debate becomes the field's shared reference. That obliges genuine even-handedness:
- Steelman every camp. State each school's strongest case in terms its proponents would accept before noting its weaknesses. Refute positions at their best, never at their worst.
- Weigh, don't tally. Conflicting results are reconciled by credibility (identification, data, replication) and by what each estimates, not by vote-counting "7 studies find positive, 4 negative."
- Attribute ideas correctly. Credit originators, not just popularizers; this is a recurring referee complaint.
- Handle live controversies without resolving by fiat. Lay out the disagreement, what evidence would settle it, and where the author's own read sits — labelled as the author's read, not as consensus.
The self-citation trap
If you have published in the field, the survey must not read as a retrospective of your program. Guardrails:
- Your own work is cited at the tier its importance to the field warrants — no more.
- Rivals to your work are given their strongest statement.
- A reader who does not know who wrote the survey cannot tell from the emphasis.
- When the field disagrees with you, say so plainly and represent the other side fairly.
Checklist
Anti-patterns
- Comprehensiveness theatre: equal-length summaries of every paper (no editorial judgment)
- Vote-counting conflicting results instead of weighing credibility and estimand
- Strawmanning the camp the author disagrees with
- A survey that doubles as the author's CV (the most-punished JEL balance failure)
- Declaring a live controversy "resolved" by assertion rather than by laying out the evidentiary state
- Crediting the popularizer of an idea over its originator
Output format
【Tiering】corpus split foundational/important/confirmatory/tangential? Y/N
【Comprehensiveness evidence】saturation log + citation set support "nothing important missing"? Y/N
【Steelman】each rival school stated at its strongest? Y/N
【Conflict handling】reconciled by credibility + estimand (not vote-count)? Y/N
【Controversy】evidence-to-settle stated; author's read labelled? Y/N
【Self-citation audit】own work at warranted tier; emphasis identity-blind? Y/N
【Next step】→ jel-tables-figures (who-found-what tables) → jel-writing-style
