A skill your agent uses when deciding whether a research question fits Comparative Political Studies (CPS) and how to frame its comparative contribution.

MITAuto-check passedResearch & Science

Install Cps Topic Selection

skills CLI
$ npx skills add brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills --skill cps-topic-selection -a claude-code

Project install by default; add -g for ~/.claude/skills/.

GitHub CLI
$ gh skill install brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills cps-topic-selection --agent claude-code

Project scope by default; add --scope user for a personal install. Needs GitHub CLI 2.90.0 or later (public preview).

Manual copy
$ git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills.git skills-src && mkdir -p .claude/skills && cp -r skills-src/Comparative-Political-Studies-Skills/skills/cps-topic-selection .claude/skills/cps-topic-selection && rm -rf skills-src

Use ~/.claude/skills/ instead of .claude/skills for a personal install. The folder must contain SKILL.md.

Claude Code skills documentation · loads skills from .claude/skills/

Facts

Skill name
cps-topic-selection
GitHub stars
1.2k
Token cost
~1.2k tokens
SKILL.md length
544 words
Files
1
Skills in repo
2,387
Repo updated
First seen
Licence
MIT

At a glance

A skill your agent uses when deciding whether a research question fits Comparative Political Studies (CPS) and how to frame its comparative contribution.

  • Works in 4 steps: Comparative leverage. What varies across… → Travel. State the argument as a… → Comparative-politics stake. Connect to a… → …
  • Deciding whether a research question fits Comparative Political Studies (CPS) and how to frame its comparative contribution
  • SKILL.md covers When to trigger, The comparative-fit test (run…, Framing priority (highest first) and Single-case work that still fits, plus 5 more sections
  • Instructions only: no scripts, shell commands, URLs or credentials in SKILL.md

What it does

Cps Topic Selection is an agent skill from brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills. Use when deciding whether a research question fits Comparative Political Studies (CPS) and how to frame its comparative contribution. Tests comparative leverage and travel; it does not design the study or write the paper.

Its SKILL.md is about 1.2k tokens, which your agent loads only when the skill is triggered. It is a single SKILL.md file with no bundled scripts.

It sits in Research & Science, covering Hypothesis generation. The repository describes itself as: Journal-specific Claude Code/Codex skill packs covering mainstream journals — AER, QJE, Nature, Cell, 管理世界, 经济研究 & 200+ more — your fast track to getting published. | 覆盖主流期刊的… The licence is MIT.

When your agent uses it

  • Deciding whether a research question fits Comparative Political Studies (CPS) and how to frame its comparative contribution
  • Tasks that involve Hypothesis generation

Example prompts

  • “/cps-topic-selection”

Workflow steps

4 steps, taken from the first numbered list in SKILL.md.

  1. Comparative leverage. What varies across your cases or over time, and does that variation
  2. Travel. State the argument as a mechanism, then name a different region or regime type where it
  3. Comparative-politics stake. Connect to a live CP debate (regime durability, institutional design,
  4. Right venue. CPS is the comparative specialist — not the general flagship (APSR/AJPS), not IR

What it can do on your machine

Read from SKILL.md and the folder at commit 932eb23. It shows what the files ask for, not the result of running them.

  • Tool permissions

    Pre-approves nothing: there is no allowed-tools line, so your agent's usual permission prompts apply.

    From allowed-tools in the SKILL.md frontmatter.

  • Runs code

    No scripts in the folder and no shell commands in SKILL.md.

    From the folder's file list and the shell code blocks in SKILL.md.

  • Network

    No URLs in SKILL.md.

    From URLs in SKILL.md, links to its own repository left out.

  • Credentials

    Names no API keys, tokens, secrets or passwords.

    From names ending in _API_KEY, _TOKEN, _SECRET, _KEY or _PASSWORD in SKILL.md.

Context cost

Cps Topic Selection loads about 1.2k tokens when it runs. Until then it costs about 60 tokens; SKILL.md has 544 words of instructions outside code blocks.

Always · name and description, kept in context so the agent knows when to use it
~60
When it runs · the whole SKILL.md, loaded when a task matches
~1.2k

Estimates: characters ÷ 4, the usual rule of thumb; real counts depend on the model's tokenizer. Scripts and assets cost tokens only if the agent reads them.

Safety

Auto-check passed

The automated check found no risky patterns in SKILL.md.

Automated static check — not a guarantee. Review scripts before installing. It scans the text of SKILL.md for risky patterns (piping downloads into a shell, reading credential files, hidden Unicode, destructive commands); files beside SKILL.md are not scanned.

SKILL.md

The full file from brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills at commit 932eb23, republished under its MIT licence (© brycewang-stanford). 544 words, ~1,180 tokens.

Download SKILL.mdSave it as .claude/skills/cps-topic-selection/SKILL.md (or your agent's skills folder).
name
cps-topic-selection
description
Use when deciding whether a research question fits Comparative Political Studies (CPS) and how to frame its comparative contribution. Tests comparative leverage and travel; it does not design the study or write the paper.

Topic Selection & Comparative Fit (cps-topic-selection)

CPS publishes work in comparative politics — democratization & regimes, political institutions, political behavior & participation, ethnic politics & conflict, comparative political economy, and parties & elections — where the contribution is comparative in design or in the portability of the claim. The first job is to confirm the question earns a place in a comparative-politics journal, not a single-country area journal and not a general poli-sci flagship.

When to trigger

  • Choosing a question or deciding if CPS is the right venue
  • A draft reads as a single-country case with no comparative leverage
  • A reviewer or colleague said "this is interesting but why CPS / why comparative?"
  • Deciding whether a single case can carry a portable theoretical claim

The comparative-fit test (run all four)

  1. Comparative leverage. What varies across your cases or over time, and does that variation identify the claim? "Why do some countries/regions/periods do X while others do Y?" is the CPS question form. A snapshot of one country at one time has none.
  2. Travel. State the argument as a mechanism, then name a different region or regime type where it should also operate. If it only makes sense in your one country, it is area studies, not CPS.
  3. Comparative-politics stake. Connect to a live CP debate (regime durability, institutional design, ethnic mobilization, redistribution, electoral behavior). A comparativist outside your region should see why the answer matters.
  4. Right venue. CPS is the comparative specialist — not the general flagship (APSR/AJPS), not IR (World Politics / International Organization), not UK-general (British Journal of Political Science). See the sibling guard below.

Framing priority (highest first)

  • A comparative puzzle with leverage — variation across cases/time that the design exploits.
  • A portable mechanism — a causal story another comparativist can carry to a new setting.
  • A measurement or conceptual advance that improves how a CP phenomenon is compared cross-nationally.
  • A reappraisal of a comparative regularity with new cases, data, or design.
  • (Weak) A single descriptive country study with no comparative or theoretical leverage.
Show full SKILL.md (215 more words)Show less

Single-case work that still fits

A single case can fit if it is a case of something general: a hard/least-likely test of a comparative theory, a deviant case that exposes scope conditions, or the source of a mechanism you argue travels. Say what the case is a case of, and to which population the claim generalizes (hand off to cps-research-design).

Sibling guard (do not mis-target)

  • APSR / AJPS — general US political-science flagships; CPS wants the comparative contribution, not a discipline-wide pitch.
  • World Politics / International Organization — IR and IR-adjacent comparative; CPS is domestic-comparative-politics first.
  • British Journal of Political Science — broad UK generalist; CPS is the comparative specialist.

Checklist

  • The question is "why do cases differ / change?" — comparative, not single-snapshot
  • The argument is a mechanism that travels to a named second setting
  • It engages an identifiable comparative-politics literature/debate
  • A comparativist of another region can state why it matters
  • Venue checked against the sibling guard (CPS, not APSR/AJPS/WP/IO/BJPS)

Anti-patterns

  • "Area studies in disguise" — one country, no comparative leverage, no claim that travels
  • Discipline-wide pitch better suited to APSR/AJPS than to the comparative-politics readership
  • A pure-IR or pure-formal-theory question that never compares political systems
  • A descriptive country profile with no puzzle, mechanism, or generalization

Output format

【Comparative puzzle】one sentence, with the variation that identifies it
【Cases / units / period】and the comparison logic
【Portable mechanism】+ a named second setting it should travel to
【CP literature engaged】the debate it speaks to
【Venue check】CPS vs. APSR/AJPS/WP/IO/BJPS — why CPS
【Next】cps-literature-positioning

Supplementary resources

© brycewang-stanford, MIT. Rendered from Markdown: HTML in the file is shown as text, images as links, and headings moved down two levels. Raw file

Files

Just SKILL.md in Comparative-Political-Studies-Skills/skills/cps-topic-selection of brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills.

Open the folder on GitHubat commit 932eb23

Compare with similar skills

Cps Topic Selection next to the 5 skills that share the most tags, products or categories with it. Stars are the repository's; “used in” counts other GitHub owners with a copy.

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Questions about Cps Topic Selection

What does Cps Topic Selection do?

A skill your agent uses when deciding whether a research question fits Comparative Political Studies (CPS) and how to frame its comparative contribution. Cps Topic Selection is an agent skill from brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills. Use when deciding whether a research question fits Comparative Political Studies (CPS) and how to frame its comparative contribution.

When should I use Cps Topic Selection?

Cps Topic Selection fits situations like: deciding whether a research question fits Comparative Political Studies (CPS) and how to frame its comparative contribution; tasks that involve Hypothesis generation.

How do I install Cps Topic Selection in Claude Code?

Run `npx skills add brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills --skill cps-topic-selection -a claude-code`. Or copy the skill folder (Comparative-Political-Studies-Skills/skills/cps-topic-selection in brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills) into .claude/skills/cps-topic-selection in your project. Claude Code loads it when a task matches its description.

How do I install Cps Topic Selection in Codex?

Run `npx skills add brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills --skill cps-topic-selection -a codex`. Or copy the skill folder (Comparative-Political-Studies-Skills/skills/cps-topic-selection in brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills) into .agents/skills/cps-topic-selection in your project. Codex loads it when a task matches its description.

Can I use Cps Topic Selection in Cursor, Gemini CLI or GitHub Copilot?

Cursor, Gemini CLI, GitHub Copilot and OpenCode also load SKILL.md folders. With the skills CLI, run `npx skills add brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills --skill cps-topic-selection -a cursor` (or -a gemini-cli, github-copilot or opencode for the others). To copy it by hand, put the folder in .cursor/skills/cps-topic-selection, .gemini/skills/cps-topic-selection, .github/skills/cps-topic-selection and .opencode/skills/cps-topic-selection in your project.

What does Cps Topic Selection need to run?

SKILL.md names no scripts, command-line tools or credentials: Cps Topic Selection is instructions for the agent only.

Does Cps Topic Selection access the network?

SKILL.md contains no URLs. Any network use would come from the scripts or tools the agent runs. This is read from the text; nothing was executed.

Is Cps Topic Selection safe to install?

Our automated static check of SKILL.md found no risky patterns, such as piping downloads into a shell, reading credential files or hidden Unicode. It is not a guarantee. Review the folder before installing.

What licence does Cps Topic Selection use?

Cps Topic Selection is published under the MIT licence (the repository's licence). It allows redistribution, so the full SKILL.md is shown on this page.

How many tokens does Cps Topic Selection use?

About 1.2k tokens (SKILL.md is roughly 4.7k characters). Agents keep only the skill's name and description in context until a task matches; then they load SKILL.md in full.

What are the alternatives to Cps Topic Selection?

Skills that share tags, products or a category with Cps Topic Selection: Hypothesis Generation (spacering-net/codeg, 3.9k stars), Nature Paper Card (Yuan1z0825/nature-skills, 47k stars), Hypothesis Generation (K-Dense-AI/claude-scientific-writer, 2.4k stars) and Good Question (Rimagination/good-question, 305 stars). The comparison table on this page puts their stars, adoption, token cost, safety result and licence side by side.

Who maintains Cps Topic Selection?

brycewang-stanford (a GitHub user) maintains it in brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills, which has 1,228 GitHub stars. The repository holds 2,387 skills in this directory. The repository was last updated on September 27, 2026.

Source: brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills on GitHub. Facts on this page come from the repository at the commit we read; the author's words are quoted as theirs.