Skill UI

An adversarial thinking partner designed for founders and C-suite executives. It stress-tests business plans, simulates difficult board meetings, and facilitates brutally honest post-mortems, ensuring vulnerabilities are found before competitors or boards do. Use when you need to challenge assumptions and face hard decisions.

This guide teaches researchers how to rigorously assess a topic's geographic significance and determine its optimal fit within the Annals of the American Association of Geographers (AAG). It implements a two-part fit test—ensuring the argument is fundamentally geographic (space/place/scale are load-bearing) and possesses sufficient reach to interest neighboring subfields. It guides authors in choosing the correct area (e.g., Human, Physical, Methods) and appropriate journal venue (Annals vs. specialty). Use this when defining a project scope, overcoming reviewer critiques, or deciding wher...

This guide helps academics determine if their research contribution is fundamentally about market microstructure—such as order flow, liquidity, price impact, or trading mechanisms—making it suitable for the Journal of Financial Markets (JFM). It provides a rigorous 'mechanism question' test to distinguish between microstructural findings and broader corporate or asset pricing issues.

This guide helps researchers evaluate the core mechanism of their academic paper, determining whether the focus is fundamentally on financial mechanisms. It provides criteria for positioning the work along the macro-finance or micro-corporate finance line, and offers advice on suggesting alternative journals if the topic drifts into general industrial, accounting, or management fields.

This comprehensive guide details the professional process for handling major or minor revisions (R&R) for academic journals. It instructs authors on how to first fundamentally revise the manuscript—strengthening mechanisms and overall contribution—and subsequently drafting a structured, non-combative, point-by-point response letter. The guide emphasizes adhering to strict academic norms, such as verbatim quoting, avoiding response duplication, and critically prioritizing the Senior Editor's main concerns.

A comprehensive war-gaming guide designed for authors preparing manuscripts for top-tier journals, such as QJE. It teaches how to anticipate hostile referee objections across different academic archetypes (e.g., identification hawks, 'so what?' skeptics) and proactively address them—both fundamentally and for robustness—before submission. This process stress-tests the paper's core claims, structure, and arguments, significantly boosting the chances of passing the initial desk-screen.