Organizing Framework — the Review's Spine (arpsych-organizing-framework)

When to trigger

• The evidence matrix is built but the draft would read like a list of studies
• Sections are named after methods ("fMRI studies", "behavioral studies") rather than ideas
• A reader could not predict what comes next or why studies are grouped as they are
• You cannot state in one sentence the argument the review makes about the field

Why the spine is the whole game at ARPsych

The most-cited reason review articles fail is that they are annotated bibliographies: study-after-study summaries with no organizing idea. A great ARPsych review imposes a structure the field did not have — a taxonomy, a unifying model, a sequence of questions, or a process diagram — that makes scattered work legible to a psychologist from an adjacent area. The framework is the contribution; the citations are the evidence. ARPsych's accessibility mandate raises the bar: the spine must be graspable by a non-specialist psychologist (a social psychologist reading a memory review) on one read. Choose it deliberately: