brycewang-stanford Literature Positioning (jole-literature-positioning)
When to trigger
- The related-work section reads as a survey rather than a contribution stake
- It is unclear which papers you build on and which you improve on
- Citations are not in Chicago author-date style or are ordered wrong in-text
- A referee could say "this has been done" and you have no crisp rebuttal
Positioning for a labor audience
JOLE referees are labor economists who know the field's frontier. Positioning is not a literature dump; it is a precise stake: which two or three papers are closest, and exactly what you add (better identification, new or linked data, a distinguished mechanism, a new population or institution). Because the journal is general-interest within labor, also locate the paper for labor economists in adjacent subfields — a wage-structure result should be legible to someone who studies migration or family economics.
Citation mechanics are JOLE-specific and load-bearing here:
- Chicago (University of Chicago Press) author-date style.
- In-text citations are ordered chronologically, then alphabetically within the same year (a, b disambiguation for same author / same year) — not purely alphabetical.
- Three or more authors are cited as first author "et al."
- Since review is single-blind (non-anonymized), cite your own prior work normally — no awkward blinding.
How to stake the contribution
- Name the frontier. Identify the 2–3 closest labor papers and state, in one clause each, what they established.
- State the gap. What did they leave unidentified, unmeasured, or unexplained?
- Place your paper. One sentence: what you add relative to each (cleaner design / new data / mechanism / population).
- Avoid double-counting. Do not re-survey a literature your contribution does not actually engage; cite enough to locate, no more — the ~20,000-word economy is unforgiving of padding.
- Connect adjacent subfields. A short bridge sentence so non-specialist labor readers see the relevance.
Checklist
- The 2–3 closest labor papers named, with what each established
- The gap your paper fills stated explicitly
- What you add vs. each closest paper is one crisp sentence
- Positioned for labor economists in adjacent subfields, not only specialists
- Chicago author-date; in-text chronological-then-alphabetical; "et al." for 3+ authors
- Self-citations written naturally (single-blind)
- No standalone survey; citations locate the contribution, nothing more
Micro-rewrite: survey register vs. stake register
Survey register: "A large literature studies wages and mobility (many citations). We contribute to this literature."
Stake register: "The closest work identifies wage effects from state-level policy variation but cannot separate incumbent wage growth from workforce composition; using matched employer–employee records, we hold composition fixed and show roughly how much of the measured gain is compositional."
The stake version names what the nearest paper established, what it could not do, and the exact margin your data or design adds — in two sentences that cost almost nothing against the ~20,000-word budget. That is the shape a JOLE referee expects.
Anti-patterns
- A two-page survey that never says what is new
- Citing twenty papers but not naming the two closest competitors
- Purely alphabetical in-text ordering instead of chronological-then-alphabetical
- Blinding self-citations (unnecessary — JOLE is single-blind)
- Positioning only against one narrow subfield when the claim is broader
- Padding the literature to look thorough at the expense of the word budget
Output format
【Closest papers】[2–3] — what each established:
【Gap】what they left open:
【Your add】one sentence vs. each:
【Adjacent-subfield bridge】one sentence:
【Citation style】Chicago author-date, chronological-then-alpha, "et al." 3+? [Y/N]
【Next step】jole-identification-strategy