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arsoc-topic-selection

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Use when judging whether a sociology literature is an Annual Review of Sociology (ARSoc)-scale review topic — mature, broadly important, and genuinely in need of an authoritative cross-subfield synthesis — and framing the review's animating question. Decides fit; it does not gather the literature (arsoc-literature-synthesis) or pitch the Committee (arsoc-proposal-and-commissioning).

Annual-Review-of-Sociology-Skills/skills/arsoc-topic-selection/SKILL.md

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# Topic Selection for an ARSoc Review (arsoc-topic-selection)

## When to trigger

- You have a candidate sociology literature and need to know if it is "ARSoc-shaped"
- A topic feels either too narrow (a single-study debate) or too sprawling (a whole field)
- You are deciding between ARSoc and a sibling outlet (ASR/AJS empirical paper, *Sociological Theory*, a handbook chapter)
- The literature is young/fast-moving and you suspect it is not yet ready for an annual-volume review

## What ARSoc is for

ARSoc is the **Annual Reviews** sociology survey series: a yearly volume of **invited, authoritative review articles** that are **accessible to sociologists outside the subfield**, not only to its specialists. The reader is a competent sociologist — a culture scholar reading the networks review, a demographer reading the race/ethnicity review — who wants to enter, teach, or locate the open questions of an area they do not currently work in. That cross-subfield reader profile, plus the annual-volume cadence, sets the fit bar. ARSoc covers the breadth of the discipline: stratification, culture, organizations, networks, race/ethnicity, gender, family, demography, political and economic sociology, and more.

## The four ARSoc-fit tests
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