Curranthro review process

Skill brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills/Current-Anthropology-Skills/skills/curranthro-review-process

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 Claude Code/Codex 期刊技能包，从选题、识别策略到表格规范与审稿回复全流程，助你快速发论文。

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npx -y skills add brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills --skill curranthro-review-process

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Use when you need to understand how Current Anthropology (CA) evaluates a manuscript — editorial screening, peer review, and the distinctive CA✩ Treatment in which an accepted Major Article is sent to invited commentators whose signed Comments are published alongside it, followed by the author's Reply. Sets expectations and shapes the paper to survive both review and public commentary; it does not contact editors.

SKILL.md

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Review Process & the CA✩ Treatment (curranthro-review-process)

Knowing how CA screens, decides, and publicly commentates lets you pre-empt the failure modes before submitting. CA is the transnational, all-fields journal published by the University of Chicago Press for the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and its defining mechanism is the CA✩ Treatment — a layer of signed, published peer commentary plus the author's Reply that no sibling journal applies. The bar is field-shaping significance plus sound, ethical evidence, and an argument that can withstand being debated in print.

When to trigger

Before submitting, to stress-test against editorial screening and the CA✩ commentary
Choosing the right article type (only Major Articles get the full CA✩ Treatment)
Interpreting a decision letter and setting expectations
Understanding what reviewers — and later, commentators — are asked to weigh

How CA review works

Editorial screening first. The editor(s) assess fit, all-fields significance, and obvious ethics issues before sending out for review. A technically fine but subfield-bound paper can be returned or redirected here. (CA receives roughly 230 manuscripts a year and accepts on the order of ~10% — treat these as approximate, verify on the live site.)
Peer review. Expert, often cross-subfield, referees evaluate the manuscript. Confirm the current anonymity model on the live Instructions for Authors before assuming single/double anonymized.
The CA✩ Treatment (Major Articles). Once a Major Article is accepted, the editors solicit Comments from an international range of relevant anthropologists. These signed Comments are published with the article, and the author writes a Reply that is printed alongside. This is the journal's signature: your paper appears with its critics and your response, all at once.
Decision categories. Reject; revise-and-resubmit (major/minor); accept. R&R is the common positive outcome; exact portal labels are not fixed in this pack.
Article-type-specific paths. Reports go through review without the full CA✩ commentary; Forums are curated multi-author debates; Discussion items/Comments (≤ 800 words) respond to recent CA pieces.

The two audiences you must satisfy

Audience	When	What they want	How to pre-empt
Referees	before acceptance	rigor, fit, all-fields significance, ethics	ground every claim; state the cross-field stake; resolve ethics up front
Commentators	after acceptance, in print	a bold, debatable, well-defended argument	anticipate the camps; pre-engage the strongest objections (see `curranthro-literature-positioning`)

Shape the paper to pass — and to reward commentary

Make all-fields significance explicit early (avoids the "subfield-only" redirect).
Engage the relevant conversations across subfields and beyond the metropolitan canon — these are the scholars who may be invited to comment.
Make the intervention bold and defensible: a Major Article that is too safe is not CA✩ material; one that is bold but unsupported will be dismantled in the published Comments.
Clear ethics up front (consent, anonymization, heritage/repatriation) — an unresolved ethics concern is a serious problem (see curranthro-transparency-and-data).

Anti-patterns

Submitting a single-subfield paper to an all-fields journal with no broad framing
Forgetting the CA✩ Treatment: writing an argument that cannot survive published, signed Comments
Targeting a Major Article when the work is really a Report (or vice versa)
Ignoring an obvious related literature or a non-metropolitan scholarship (your commentators won't)
Leaving consent/heritage/anonymization unresolved and hoping review will overlook it

Output format

【Screening check】fit / all-fields significance / ethics — any red flags?
【Article type】Major Article (CA✩) / Report / Forum / Discussion (right path?)
【Significance】broad enough to clear "subfield-only"? [Y/N]
【Commentary-readiness】bold + defensible enough for published Comments? [Y/N]
【Likely commentators】camps anticipated and pre-engaged? [Y/N]
【Ethics cleared】consent / anonymization / heritage resolved? [Y/N]
【Realistic outcome】reject / R&R / (rare) accept → then CA✩ Comments for Major Articles
【Next】curranthro-submission (or curranthro-rebuttal if decided / Comments received)

Calibration anchors (hedged)

The CA✩ Treatment applies to Major Articles: expect to write a Reply to published Comments — a different task from a normal R&R (see curranthro-rebuttal).
Manuscript volume (~230/yr) and acceptance (~10%) figures circulate publicly but vary by year — verify on the live Wenner-Gren / UChicago Press pages.
Decision-category names, reviewer counts, and the exact anonymity model are not fixed here; use the live Editorial Manager / editorial-letter wording.

Supplementary resources

../../resources/official-source-map.md — CA✩ Treatment, article types, review model, editors, acceptance figures