Organizing Framework — the Acceptance Bar (amann-organizing-framework)

When to trigger

• The coding matrix is built but the draft would read like a list of papers
• Sections are named after sub-topics ("Antecedents", "Outcomes") rather than ideas
• You cannot state in one sentence the new way of seeing the field the review delivers
• A reader could not predict why streams are grouped as they are, or what the review argues

Why the framework is the whole game at Annals

Annals is "reviews with an attitude": it does not reward accurate summary, it rewards theory advancement through synthesis. The acceptance bar is whether the review imposes an organizing logic the field did not have — a typology, a process model, an integrating construct, a reconciliation of rival camps — that makes scattered work legible and generates a research agenda. The framework is the contribution; the citations are the evidence. This is what separates Annals from a descriptive review and from its sibling AMR, where new theory stands alone rather than emerging from a literature. Choose the spine deliberately: