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arecon-organizing-framework

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Use when imposing an analytical structure or taxonomy on a literature for an Annual Review of Economics (ARE) review — the "spine" that turns a reading list into an argument about the field. Designs the framework; it does not gather the literature (arecon-literature-synthesis) or appraise evidence and balance (arecon-evidence-standards).

Annual-Review-of-Economics-Skills/skills/arecon-organizing-framework/SKILL.md

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

## When to trigger

- The evidence matrix is built but the draft would read like a list of papers
- Sections are named after topics ("Empirical studies", "Theoretical work") rather than ideas
- A reader could not predict what comes next or why papers 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 ARE

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

| Spine type | Organizes the field by | Best when |
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