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: