jaar-sources-and-evidence
GitHub用于JAAR宗教研究论文的证据基础处理。指导如何严谨地选择、引用和分析一手资料（如文本、实物、田野调查），确保翻译准确、来源可靠并纳入反证，符合人文学科规范。
Trigger Scenarios
Install
npx skills add brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills --skill jaar-sources-and-evidence -g -y
SKILL.md
Frontmatter
{
"name": "jaar-sources-and-evidence",
"description": "Use when handling the evidence base of a Journal of the American Academy of Religion (JAAR) article — primary texts, traditions, historical documents, material\/visual sources, or ethnographic fieldwork. Plans rigorous, transparent source work for humanities scholarship in the study of religion; it does not run statistics."
}
Sources & Evidence (jaar-sources-and-evidence)
Religious-studies scholarship rests on primary materials: scriptures and commentaries, ritual and liturgical texts, historical archives, material and visual culture, or fieldwork. JAAR judges whether your handling of these sources is careful, well-situated, and adequate to the claim. This is humanities evidence — no datasets or replication, but rigor still governs.
When to trigger
- Selecting and justifying the primary sources the argument rests on
- A reviewer questioned your translation, dating, provenance, or representativeness
- Integrating fieldwork/interviews into a humanities argument
- Deciding what is primary vs. secondary and how much to quote
Source-work standards JAAR expects
- Cite from primary sources. Ground claims in the texts/traditions/objects themselves, not only in others' summaries; secondary literature situates, primary evidence proves.
- Languages and translation. Work from originals where the argument depends on wording; state which edition/translation you use and why; flag contested terms (and consider transliteration conventions).
- Provenance, dating, and context. Establish what a source is, when/where it comes from, and its genre — a claim is only as strong as the source's status supports.
- Representativeness and selection. Be explicit about why these sources/cases; do not generalize a tradition from one atypical text without saying so.
- Fieldwork/ethnography. Describe access, consent, and positionality; protect interlocutors;
represent them fairly (this connects to
jaar-theory-and-methodreflexivity). - Disconfirming evidence. Engage sources that cut against the thesis rather than omitting them.
Quoting and apparatus
- Quote enough to let the reader see the evidence, not so much that the essay becomes a source-reader.
- Translations: provide the original where the argument turns on it; note translator.
- Images/material culture: secure permissions if reproduced; describe what the reader cannot see.
Anti-patterns
- Building a claim only on secondary summaries of primary texts
- Cherry-picking passages and ignoring counter-evidence in the same corpus
- Generalizing a whole tradition from one unrepresentative source
- Silent reliance on a translation when the argument depends on the original wording
- Ethnographic claims with no account of access, consent, or positionality
Output format
【Primary sources】what they are + why these
【Languages/editions】originals vs translations; contested terms flagged
【Provenance/context】dating, genre, status established?
【Selection/representativeness】justified? atypical cases flagged?
【Fieldwork (if any)】access, consent, positionality handled?
【Counter-evidence】engaged, not omitted?
【Next】jaar-theory-and-method
Evidence-type rigor matrix
JAAR articles run on radically different evidence — a Sanskrit manuscript, a colonial archive, a temple relief, a set of interviews — and a referee for the AAR/Oxford University Press flagship will judge each by its own craft standard. Identify your dominant evidence type and meet the column that governs it.
| Evidence type | What a JAAR referee scrutinizes | Easy disqualifier |
|---|---|---|
| Scriptural / commentarial text | Edition, recension, language of access | Translation quoted where wording carries the claim |
| Historical archive | Provenance, dating, the document's genre and bias | A polemical source read as neutral report |
| Material / visual culture | Object description, context of use, permissions | Iconographic claims with no image |
| Ethnographic fieldwork | Access, consent, positionality, fair representation | Generalizing from a few interlocutors |
| Comparative corpus | Why these cases; commensurability | Cherry-picked exemplars that flatter the thesis |
Worked vignette: an over-reaching textual claim, right-sized
An author argues that "Sufi poetry rejects legalism," quoting Rumi in a popular translation. A JAAR reader will resist on source grounds:
- Cite from the primary source. The claim turns on wording, so the author moves to the Persian, names the edition, and notes where the popular translation smooths a key term.
- Representativeness. One poet's verses cannot stand for "Sufi poetry"; the author narrows the claim to the corpus actually examined, or flags the case as illustrative.
- Disconfirming evidence. The author engages Sufi texts that uphold sharī'a rather than omitting
them, converting an over-claim into a defensible, bounded reading (with apparatus discipline that
dovetails with
jaar-citation-and-style).
Source-handling pushback → the fix
- "You read translations as if they were the text" → supply the original; note edition and translator.
- "One case, whole-tradition claim" → narrow the claim or justify the selection.
- "Where is the consent / positionality account?" → add all three.
Hedged calibration: as a humanities venue JAAR has no datasets, statistics, or replication archive — rigor is sourcing rigor, not reproducibility. Specific permissions practice for reproduced images and any data-availability language for fieldwork-based work should be confirmed against the journal's current submission guidelines, which can change with publisher policy.
Supplementary resources
../../resources/external_tools.md— primary-source databases and tools for the study of religion../../resources/official-source-map.md— JAAR scope across traditions and methods
Version History
- 1839142 Current 2026-07-05 13:59
