amann-evidence-standards

1# Evidence Standards — Appraisal & Balance (amann-evidence-standards)
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3## When to trigger
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5- The framework is set and you are filling cells with the literature
6- The field has rival schools, a live controversy, or conflicting empirical results
7- You must decide whether to cite *everything* or curate, and how to weigh disagreeing studies
8- You are a contributor to this literature and worry the review tilts toward your own work
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10## At Annals you are the field's reviewer-of-record
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12An 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.
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14## Completeness vs. selectivity: the Annals contract
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16A review must be **comprehensive in coverage** yet **selective in emphasis** — long (~50 pages) but not an inventory. Resolve the tension by **tiering** the corpus:
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18| Tier | Treatment |
19|------|-----------|
20| **Foundational / field-defining** | discussed in text — what it established and its limits |
21| **Important contributions** | grouped and weighed within the framework's cells; cited with their finding |
22| **Confirmatory / incremental** | cited in clusters ("see also …") to show coverage without bloating prose |
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