Agent skill

Imfer Referee Strategy

by brycewang-stanford in brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills

A skill your agent uses when anticipating the objections a dual academic/policy IMF Economic Review (IMFER) referee will raise, so a manuscript pre-empts them before submission or addresses them in…

MITAuto-check passedResearch & Science

Install Imfer Referee Strategy

skills CLI
$ npx skills add brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills --skill imfer-referee-strategy -a claude-code

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

GitHub CLI
$ gh skill install brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills imfer-referee-strategy --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/IMF-Economic-Review-Skills/skills/imfer-referee-strategy .claude/skills/imfer-referee-strategy && 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
imfer-referee-strategy
GitHub stars
1.2k
Token cost
~1.9k tokens
SKILL.md length
890 words
Files
1
Skills in repo
2,387
Repo updated
First seen
Licence
MIT

At a glance

A skill your agent uses when anticipating the objections a dual academic/policy IMF Economic Review (IMFER) referee will raise, so a manuscript pre-empts them before submission or addresses them in…

  • Works in 5 steps: War-game the design. For each… → War-game the policy claim. IMFER's… → Lead with composition. Put… → …
  • Anticipating the objections a dual academic/policy IMF Economic Review (IMFER) referee will raise
  • SKILL.md covers When to trigger, How IMFER review works (plan…, Strategy craft and Checklist, plus 4 more sections
  • Instructions only: no scripts, shell commands, URLs or credentials in SKILL.md

What it does

Imfer Referee Strategy is an agent skill from brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills. Use when anticipating the objections a dual academic/policy IMF Economic Review (IMFER) referee will raise, so a manuscript pre-empts them before submission or addresses them in revision. Plans the defense; it does not draft the response letter (imfer-rebuttal) or run the submission preflight (imfer-submission).

Its SKILL.md is about 1.9k 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 Peer review. 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

  • Anticipating the objections a dual academic/policy IMF Economic Review (IMFER) referee will raise
  • So a manuscript pre-empts them before submission
  • Addresses them in revision

Example prompts

  • “/imfer-referee-strategy”

Workflow steps

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

  1. War-game the design. For each identifying assumption, write the sentence a hostile referee would use; if you cannot answer it in one…
  2. War-game the policy claim. IMFER's distinctive risk is the policy referee: state exactly what the finding licenses and what it does not.
  3. Lead with composition. Put leave-one-country-out and the global-cycle control in the main paper — these are the first things an IMFER…
  4. Pre-empt, do not hide the obvious weakness; referees punish papers that ignore the elephant.
  5. Make reproducibility visible so the restricted-data concern is defused before it is raised.

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

Imfer Referee Strategy loads about 1.9k tokens when it runs. Until then it costs about 84 tokens; SKILL.md has 890 words of instructions outside code blocks.

Always · name and description, kept in context so the agent knows when to use it
~84
When it runs · the whole SKILL.md, loaded when a task matches
~1.9k

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). 890 words, ~1,883 tokens.

Download SKILL.mdSave it as .claude/skills/imfer-referee-strategy/SKILL.md (or your agent's skills folder).
name
imfer-referee-strategy
description
Use when anticipating the objections a dual academic/policy IMF Economic Review (IMFER) referee will raise, so a manuscript pre-empts them before submission or addresses them in revision. Plans the defense; it does not draft the response letter (imfer-rebuttal) or run the submission preflight (imfer-submission).

Referee Strategy (imfer-referee-strategy)

When to trigger

  • The paper is near submission and you want to stress-test it against the referees it will draw
  • You must decide which robustness/identification checks to run before submitting vs. hold in reserve
  • An R&R arrived and you must map referee concerns to concrete responses
  • You want to understand how IMFER's double-blind, dual-audience review shapes strategy

How IMFER review works (plan around it)

IMFER uses double-blind review through Editorial Manager (anonymize the main file and self-citations) (检索于 2026-06;以官网为准). The distinctive feature is the referee pool: typically one frontier international-macro researcher and readers attuned to policy relevance and IMF-program realism. The modal report attacks (1) the credibility of the cross-country / policy-surprise design, then (2) country composition and external validity, then (3) whether the policy implication is actually warranted. A clean estimate with an over-reached or under-developed policy claim is a common rejection. Plan to pre-empt the predictable objections in the paper and reserve the letter for genuinely new asks.

Referee objection (by type)Pre-emption to build in now
"TWFE is biased under staggered policy adoption"heterogeneity-robust estimator + clean event-study leads already in the paper
"Driven by a few countries / one region"leave-one-country-out and drop-dominant in the main paper
"This is the global financial cycle, not your variable"global-cycle / US-shock control shown to leave the result intact
"Policy is endogenous to the crisis"external instrument / narrative timing + selection-into-program defense
"Spillovers violate SUTVA across borders"explicit interference assumption or a network/spatial design
"Inference ignores cross-country dependence"Driscoll–Kraay / two-way clustering; wild-cluster for few countries
"Effect ≠ the policy-relevant magnitude"estimand stated; magnitude in policy units; scope of the implication bounded
"The policy implication overreaches the evidence"implication explicitly bounded to what the design supports
"Not reproducible / restricted data"package built with access instructions (imfer-replication-package)
"External validity beyond this sample?"estimand + scope stated; the regime where the result transfers is named
Triaging which checks to run before vs. after

Not every conceivable check belongs in the submitted paper. Run before submission the checks a referee is near-certain to demand — the country-composition tests, the global-cycle control, the modern staggered-DID estimator, the cross-country-robust inference — because their absence reads as a hole. Hold in reserve the secondary perturbations (alternative deflators, additional subsamples, a placebo or two) that you can deploy in the response letter if asked, so the submitted paper stays readable. The judgment call is the boundary: anything an IMFER referee would consider a threat to the headline goes in now; anything that is merely a "would be nice" can wait. Putting reserve checks in an online appendix you reference is the safe middle path.

Strategy craft

  1. War-game the design. For each identifying assumption, write the sentence a hostile referee would use; if you cannot answer it in one paragraph + one exhibit, fix it before submission.
  2. War-game the policy claim. IMFER's distinctive risk is the policy referee: state exactly what the finding licenses and what it does not.
  3. Lead with composition. Put leave-one-country-out and the global-cycle control in the main paper — these are the first things an IMFER referee checks.
  4. Pre-empt, do not hide the obvious weakness; referees punish papers that ignore the elephant.
  5. Make reproducibility visible so the restricted-data concern is defused before it is raised.
Show full SKILL.md (352 more words)Show less

Checklist

  • Main file and self-citations anonymized for double-blind review
  • Each identifying assumption has a hostile-referee sentence and a one-paragraph+one-exhibit answer
  • Country-composition checks (leave-one-out, drop-dominant) in the main paper
  • Global financial cycle / common-shock confound pre-empted
  • Policy-endogeneity and selection-into-program addressed
  • Decisive checks placed in the main paper; reserve checks held for the letter or online appendix
  • Estimand + policy magnitude + scope of the implication stated to pre-empt the policy referee
  • The policy claim is bounded to what the evidence supports (no overreach)
  • External validity / transfer regime named to pre-empt the guaranteed scope question
  • Reproducibility package referenced so restricted-data suspicion is defused

Anti-patterns

  • Ignoring the obvious design weakness and hoping no referee notices
  • Leaving identifiers/self-citations that break double-blind anonymity
  • Over-reaching the policy implication — the fastest way to lose the policy referee
  • No country-composition checks when one economy obviously dominates
  • Treating the global financial cycle as someone else's problem
  • Leaving the replication package as an acceptance-time afterthought
  • Writing for the academic referee only and forgetting the paper will also be read for program realism
  • Dumping every reserve check into the main text so the paper becomes unreadable
  • Assuming an international-macro referee will not notice mis-specified cross-country inference

Worked vignette (illustrative)

Before submitting a debt-spillover paper, the team war-games both tracks. The academic sentence: "Your event windows overlap the GFC, so you are picking up the global shock." Pre-emption: drop the GFC window and add a global-cycle control in the main paper. The policy sentence: "You claim restructurings should be faster, but your sample is all post-default — survivorship." Pre-emption: re-scope the implication to defaulting countries and add a selection-into-default note. Each objection gets one paragraph plus one exhibit in the paper, so the actual reports raise only genuinely new points.

Referee pushback mapped to the pre-emption

  • "This is the global financial cycle, not your variable." → Show the global-cycle control and the dropped-crisis window in the main text before a referee asks.
  • "The policy claim overreaches." → State the estimand and bound the implication to the regime the design covers.
  • "Restricted data — can this be reproduced?" → Reference the built package with access instructions so the suspicion never forms.

Output format

text
【Journal】IMF Economic Review
【Skill】imfer-referee-strategy
【Anonymization】main file + self-cites blinded? [Y/N]
【Design objection map】per assumption: [objection → pre-emption in paper]
【Composition checks】leave-one-out / drop-dominant in main paper? [Y/N]
【Common-shock】global-cycle control shown? [Y/N]
【Policy claim】estimand + magnitude stated; implication bounded? [Y/N]
【Reproducibility visible】package referenced? [Y/N]
【Next step】imfer-submission

© 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 IMF-Economic-Review-Skills/skills/imfer-referee-strategy of brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills.

Open the folder on GitHubat commit 932eb23

Compare with similar skills

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Questions about Imfer Referee Strategy

What does Imfer Referee Strategy do?

A skill your agent uses when anticipating the objections a dual academic/policy IMF Economic Review (IMFER) referee will raise, so a manuscript pre-empts them before submission or addresses them in…. Imfer Referee Strategy is an agent skill from brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills. Use when anticipating the objections a dual academic/policy IMF Economic Review (IMFER) referee will raise, so a manuscript pre-empts them before submission or addresses them in revision.

When should I use Imfer Referee Strategy?

Imfer Referee Strategy fits situations like: anticipating the objections a dual academic/policy IMF Economic Review (IMFER) referee will raise; so a manuscript pre-empts them before submission; addresses them in revision.

How do I install Imfer Referee Strategy in Claude Code?

Run `npx skills add brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills --skill imfer-referee-strategy -a claude-code`. Or copy the skill folder (IMF-Economic-Review-Skills/skills/imfer-referee-strategy in brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills) into .claude/skills/imfer-referee-strategy in your project. Claude Code loads it when a task matches its description.

How do I install Imfer Referee Strategy in Codex?

Run `npx skills add brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills --skill imfer-referee-strategy -a codex`. Or copy the skill folder (IMF-Economic-Review-Skills/skills/imfer-referee-strategy in brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills) into .agents/skills/imfer-referee-strategy in your project. Codex loads it when a task matches its description.

Can I use Imfer Referee Strategy 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 imfer-referee-strategy -a cursor` (or -a gemini-cli, github-copilot or opencode for the others). To copy it by hand, put the folder in .cursor/skills/imfer-referee-strategy, .gemini/skills/imfer-referee-strategy, .github/skills/imfer-referee-strategy and .opencode/skills/imfer-referee-strategy in your project.

What does Imfer Referee Strategy need to run?

SKILL.md names no scripts, command-line tools or credentials: Imfer Referee Strategy is instructions for the agent only.

Does Imfer Referee Strategy 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 Imfer Referee Strategy 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 Imfer Referee Strategy use?

Imfer Referee Strategy 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 Imfer Referee Strategy use?

About 1.9k tokens (SKILL.md is roughly 7.5k 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 Imfer Referee Strategy?

Skills that share tags, products or a category with Imfer Referee Strategy: Peer Review (spacering-net/codeg, 3.9k stars), Scholar Evaluation (spacering-net/codeg, 3.9k stars), Academic Paper Writing Pipeline (Imbad0202/academic-research-skills, 51k stars) and Academic Paper Reviewer (Imbad0202/academic-research-skills, 51k stars). The comparison table on this page puts their stars, adoption, token cost, safety result and licence side by side.

Who maintains Imfer Referee Strategy?

brycewang-stanford (a GitHub user) maintains it in brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills, which has 1,231 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.