Evidence Standards — Appraisal & Balance (amann-evidence-standards)

When to trigger

• The framework is set and you are filling cells with the literature
• The field has rival schools, a live controversy, or conflicting empirical results
• You must decide whether to cite everything or curate, and how to weigh disagreeing studies
• You are a contributor to this literature and worry the review tilts toward your own work

At Annals you are the field's reviewer-of-record

An Annals review carries no estimates of its own — but it is not therefore neutral. The "attitude" is disciplined critical appraisal: you judge how good the cumulative evidence is, reconcile conflicts by credibility, and state where the field's confidence is and is not warranted. This is the review-craft replacement for primary-research robustness checks: you are appraising other people's designs, not defending your own.

Completeness vs. selectivity: the Annals contract

A review must be comprehensive in coverage yet selective in emphasis — long (~50 pages) but not an inventory. Resolve the tension by tiering the corpus:

Tier	Treatment
Foundational / field-defining	discussed in text — what it established and its limits
Important contributions	grouped and weighed within the framework's cells; cited with their finding
Confirmatory / incremental	cited in clusters ("see also …") to show coverage without bloating prose
Tangential	cited only where it bears on a specific claim

Comprehensiveness is proven by the citation set (the saturation log from amann-literature-synthesis); selectivity is exercised in the prose. Equal-length summaries of every paper abdicate the editorial judgment that is the review's value.

Weighing conflicting evidence (not vote-counting)

Management findings conflict constantly. Reconcile them by why they differ, never by tally:

• Weigh by credibility. Design strength (causal vs. correlational), sample, measurement validity, replication, and publication-bias risk — not "9 studies positive, 4 negative."
• Separate by construct and context. Studies often disagree because they measure different constructs or run in different settings; surface that rather than forcing a false consensus.
• Flag the cumulative-evidence quality. State plainly where the evidence is strong, mixed, or thin — and where apparent consensus rests on a few non-independent studies.
• Name what would settle it. For a live debate, specify the study design that would resolve it (this seeds the agenda).

When appraisal needs an actual number (execution bridge)

Occasionally a credibility judgment cannot be settled by reading alone: the review's account of a controversy hinges on whether a staggered-adoption TWFE estimate survives modern corrections, or an apparent consensus may melt once publication bias is priced in. When a load-bearing magnitude comes with a replication package, audit it rather than adjudicate by prose — the shared playbook execution-with-mcp maps each design family to callable StatsPAI / Stata MCP tools (bacon_decomposition to expose bad-comparison weighting, callaway_santanna to re-estimate, honest_did_from_result for pre-trend fragility). Any number produced this way must come from an actual run and be labelled as the review's own re-analysis. This is the exception, not the Annals default: most appraisal here stays qualitative.

Fairness across schools and the self-citation trap

Annals is the review-of-the-field: its account of a debate becomes the field's shared reference, and the surveyed authors often referee the review. Balance is therefore both ethical and strategic.

• Steelman every camp. State each school's strongest case in terms its proponents would accept before critiquing it. Refute positions at their best.
• Attribute ideas to originators, not popularizers — a recurring referee complaint.
• Audit self-citation. Your own work is cited at the tier its importance to the field warrants — no more. Rivals get their strongest statement. A reader who does not know who wrote the review cannot tell from the emphasis.
• Label your read as your read. Where you take a provocative position (the "attitude"), mark it as the author's judgment, not as settled consensus.

Checklist

• Corpus tiered (foundational / important / confirmatory / tangential); prose emphasis matches tier
• Comprehensiveness provable from the citation set + saturation log
• Conflicting findings reconciled by credibility, construct, and context — not vote-counting
• Cumulative-evidence quality stated (strong / mixed / thin) per claim
• Every rival school stated at its strongest before critique (steelman)
• Idea attribution traces to originators
• Self-citation audited: own work at field-warranted tier; emphasis identity-blind
• Provocative positions labelled as the author's read; what-would-settle-it named for live debates
• No important author/school an informed referee could say was slighted or omitted

Anti-patterns

• Comprehensiveness theatre: equal-length summaries of every paper (no editorial judgment)
• Vote-counting conflicting results instead of weighing credibility, construct, and context
• Treating all findings as equally credible regardless of design quality
• Strawmanning the camp the author disagrees with (the referee may be that camp)
• A review that doubles as the author's CV (the most-punished balance failure)
• Declaring a live controversy "resolved" by assertion rather than by laying out the evidentiary state

Output format

【Tiering】corpus split foundational/important/confirmatory/tangential? Y/N
【Comprehensiveness evidence】saturation log + citation set support "nothing important missing"? Y/N
【Conflict handling】reconciled by credibility + construct + context (not vote-count)? Y/N
【Evidence quality】strong/mixed/thin stated per claim? Y/N
【Steelman】each rival school stated at its strongest? Y/N
【Self-citation audit】own work at warranted tier; emphasis identity-blind? Y/N
【Attitude labelled】provocative reads marked as author's judgment? Y/N
【Next skill】→ amann-tables-figures (who-found-what tables + framework figure)