-
Notifications
You must be signed in to change notification settings - Fork 1
/
writing-advice.Rmd
97 lines (70 loc) · 6.63 KB
/
writing-advice.Rmd
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
---
title: Writing Advice
---
Hello world!
# Writing
- Chris Adolph. [Writing Empirical Papers: 6 Rules & 12 Recommendations](http://faculty.washington.edu/cadolph/503/papers.pdf)
- Barry R. Weingast. 2015. [Caltech Rules for Writing Papers: How to Structure Your Paper and Write an Introduction](https://web.stanford.edu/group/mcnollgast/cgi-bin/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/CALTECH.RUL_..pdf)
- [The Science of Scientific Writing](http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/id.877,y.0,no.,content.true,page.1,css.print/issue.aspx) *American Scientist*
- Deidre McCloskey. [Economical Writing](http://www.amazon.com/Economical-Writing-Deirdre-McCloskey/dp/1577660633/)
- William Thompson. [A Guide for the Young Economist](http://www.amazon.com/Guide-Young-Economist-MIT-Press/dp/026251589X). "Chapter 2: Writing Papers."
- Stephen Van Evera. [Guide to Methods for Students of Political Science](http://www.amazon.com/Guide-Methods-Students-Political-Science/dp/080148457X). Appendix.
- Joseph M. Williams and Joseph Bizup. [Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace](http://www.amazon.com/dp/0321898680/)
- Strunk and White. *The Elements of Style*
- [Chicago Manual of Style](http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/) and [APSA Style Manual for Political Science](http://www.apsanet.org/Portals/54/APSA%20Files/publications/APSAStyleManual2006.pdf) for editorial and style issues.
- [How to construct a Nature summary paragraph](http://www.nature.com/nature/authors/gta/Letter_bold_para.doc). Though specifi to *Nature* is good advice for structuring abstracts or introductions.
- Ezra Klein. [How researchers are terrible communications, and how they can do better](http://chrisblattman.com/2015/11/05/ezra-klein-how-researchers-are-terrible-communicators-and-how-they-can-do-better/).
- The advice in the *AJPS* [Instructions for Submitting Authors](http://ajps.org/guidelines-for-manuscripts/) is a concise description of how to write an abstract:
> The abstract should provide a very concise descriptive summary of the research stream to which the manuscript contributes, the specific research topic it addresses, the research strategy employed for the analysis, the results obtained from the analysis, and the implications of the findings.
- [Concrete Advice for Writing Informative Abstracts](http://connection.sagepub.com/blog/sage-connection/2014/05/15/concrete-advice-for-writing-informative-abstracts/) and pHow to Carefully Choose Useless Titles for Academic Writing](http://www.socialsciencespace.com/2014/03/how-to-carefully-choose-useless-titles-for-academic-writing/)
# Finding Ideas for Research
Paul Krugman [How I Work](http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/howiwork.html). His basic rules are
> 1. Listen to the Gentiles
> 2. Question the question
> 3. Dare to be silly
> 4. Simplify, simplify
See Hal Varian. [How to build an Economic Model in your spare time](http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~hal/Papers/how.pdf)
> The first step is to get an idea. This is not all that hard to do. The tricky part is to get
a good idea. The way you do this is to come up with lots and lots of ideas and throw out
all the ones that aren’t good.
> But where to get ideas, that’s the question. Most graduate students are convinced
that the way you get ideas is to read journal articles. But in my experience journals
really aren’t a very good source of original ideas. You can get lots of things from journal
articles—technique, insight, even truth. But most of the time you will only get someone
else’s ideas. ...
> My suggestion is rather different: I think that you should look for your ideas outside
the academic journals—in newspapers, in magazines, in conversations, and in TV and
radio programs. ...
> Conversations, especially with people in business, are often very fruitful. Commerce
is conducted in many ways, and most of them have never been subjected to a serious
economic analysis. ...
> In many cases your ideas can come from your own life and experiences. ...
> Before you start trying to decide whether your idea is correct, you should stop to ask
whether it is interesting. If it isn’t interesting, no one will care whether it is correct or not.
So try it out on a few people—see if they think that it is worth pursuing. What would
follow from this idea if it is correct? ...
> The first thing that most graduate students do is they rush to the literature to see if
someone else had this idea already. However, my advice is to wait a bit before you look
at the literature. Eventually you should do a thorough literature review, of course, but I
think that you will do much better if you work on your idea for a few weeks before doing
a systematic literature search....
Greg Mankiw, [My Rules of Thumb](http://faculty.som.yale.edu/jameschoi/mankiw_tips.pdf):
> Coming up with ideas is the hardest and least controllable
> part of the research process. It is somewhat easier if you have
> broad interests. Most obviously, broad interests give you more
> opportunities for success. A miner is more likely to strike gold if
> he looks over a large field than over the same field over and
> over again
Also the links in this Greg Mankiw [Advice for Grad Students](http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2006/05/advice-for-grad-students.html)
# Replications
Gary King has advice on how to turn a replication into a publishable paper:
- Gary King [How to Write a Publishable Paper as a Class Project](http://gking.harvard.edu/papers)
- Gary King. 2006. "[Publication, Publication.](http://gking.harvard.edu/files/abs/paperspub-abs.shtml)" *PS: Political Science and Politics*.
- [Political Science Should Not Stop Young Researchers from Replicating](https://politicalsciencereplication.wordpress.com/2015/06/15/political-science-should-not-stop-young-researchers-from-replicating/) from the [Political Science Replication](https://politicalsciencereplication.wordpress.com) blog.
And see the examples of students replications from his Harvard course at https://politicalsciencereplication.wordpress.com/
Famous replications.
- David Broockman, Joahua Kalla, and Peter Aronow. 2015. [Irregularities in LaCour (2014)](http://stanford.edu/~dbroock/broockman_kalla_aronow_lg_irregularities.pdf).
- Homas Herndon, Michael Ash & Robert Pollin (2013). Does High Public Debt Consistently Stifle Economic Growth? A Critique of Reinhart and Rogoff. Working Paper Series 322. Political Economy Research Institute. [[URL](http://www.peri.umass.edu/236/hash/31e2ff374b6377b2ddec04deaa6388b1/publication/566/)]
However, although those replications are famous for finding fraud or obvious errors in the analysis,
replications can lead to extensions and generate new ideas.
This was the intent of Brookman, Kalla, and Aronow when starting the replication.