Literature Positioning (jmf-literature-positioning)

JMF is interdisciplinary, so a paper that engages only one discipline's family literature reads as under-positioned. The goal is to place the work where a family-science audience — demographers, family sociologists, relationship and developmental psychologists — can see the gap and the move.

When to trigger

• Drafting or revising the introduction and the "contribution" paragraph
• A reviewer said you "missed obvious family-science work" or "don't engage the debate"
• Your home-discipline literature is solid but the paper doesn't connect across family science
• You need to distinguish your contribution from the closest prior family studies

How JMF wants the literature engaged

1. Engage the family-science conversation, not a citation pile. Identify the live question in the field your paper speaks to (e.g., does cohabitation function like marriage; how family structure shapes child outcomes; selection vs. causation in union effects).
2. Cross disciplines deliberately. A demographic paper on divorce should engage the psychological literature on relationship quality where relevant, and vice versa. JMF readers expect the paper to know the family-science frontier, not just its own subfield.
3. Name the gap precisely. Not "little is known" — say what is contested, mismeasured, under-theorized, confounded by selection, or untested across groups/time/context.
4. Position the contribution as a move. "Prior work shows association A; we show it is conditional on family structure C / disappears net of selection / operates through process M."
5. Pre-empt the obvious rival. JMF reviewers are expert; name the strongest alternative account (especially selection) and say how the design adjudicates it (hand off to jmf-research-design).

Cross-discipline engagement (a distinctive JMF demand)

Anti-patterns

• A "literature dump" with no organizing family-science question
• Engaging only your home discipline (a common JMF positioning weakness)
• Ignoring selection as the leading rival explanation in observational family research
• Self-citation that breaks anonymity (JMF is double-blind — see jmf-submission)
• Claiming "first to study" when the contribution is incremental

Positioning pass for Journal of Marriage and Family

Treat this skill as an executable review pass, not a prose hint. First lock the family process, population/sample frame, measurement validity, and longitudinal or comparative leverage; then judge whether the current manuscript answers the venue's real reader: family scholars who inspect measurement, household process, longitudinal design, and implications for family theory.

• Do the pass: Build a three-column map: incumbent conversation, unresolved tension, and this manuscript's delta; include one sibling-venue omission that would make a referee doubt the fit.
• Return a ledger: give claim / evidence / risk / manuscript location rows, so the next agent can edit rather than rediscover the issue.
• Sibling guard: compare against Demography for population-process emphasis, Social Forces for general sociology, Child Development for child-centered outcomes; if a sibling owns the contribution, recommend re-routing before polishing format.
• Stop condition: do not give submission-ready advice until the pack's resources/official-source-map.md has been checked for volatile rules and the manuscript has one concrete fix for the largest venue-specific risk.

Output format

【Question】the live family-science debate / open question
【Key works】the 4-6 that define it (incl. cross-discipline)
【Gap】what is contested / mismeasured / confounded / untested
【Move】how this paper changes the conversation
【Strongest rival】(often selection) and how the design will adjudicate it
【Next】jmf-theory-and-conceptual-framework

Supplementary resources

• ../../resources/external_tools.md — family-science data sources to ground the literature
• ../../resources/official-source-map.md — JMF scope and interdisciplinary remit