Structure of a quantitative empirical research paper

Organization

Most quantitative empirical research projects have a similar structure that includes a very similar set of sections. These are detailed below. Requirements in terms of formatting will usually vary between journals (e.g., APA6, Chicago, MLA, etc). In the Social Sciences, APA6 seems to be the most common.

Front matter

Your front matter is not a formal section but a collection of material that comes before your paper. Front matter usually includes:

• A titlepage that includes:
  • The full title of the paper.
  • The name, affiliation, and email of each author.
  • A note (often in a footnote) thanking others for support.
• An abstract, usually between 150-250 words.

Introduction

Your introduction should be short: not more than 2-3 pages and 5-6 paragraphs. Your introduction should only seek to do three things:

1. Introduce and motivate your work.
2. Establish the importance, relevance, and impact of your work providing a clear answer to the question, "Why should a reader care?"
3. In the final paragraph, lay out the organization of the rest of the paper.

Background

I have more general advice on this elsewhere on the wiki but the important point is that the background really only needs to do two things:

1. Define the terms you'll be using in your study.
2. Build up the rationale for your hypotheses.

Critically, a background section is not a comprehensive literature review. It should be a coherant argument that explains and presents your research questions.

The background section should end with your hypothesis or hypotheses. If you have several distinct hypotheses, you can end each subsection with the hypothesis once you have presented the terms and rationales for each.

Research Design

This section should present details of how you carried out your study. Usually, it will includes subsections that touch on (if they are not explicitly named):

Empirical Setting

Describe the site of your research in detail.

Research Ethics

Describe any IRB approval you carried out for this research. If your work does not require IRB approval, describe this and explain how your work minimizes risks to the human subjects whose data is captured in your dataset.

Procedures

Describe the process that you used to collect your data. Detail choices you made along the way that include or excluded any data.

Measures

Describe every variable you included in your model and how it was constructed and how it is coded. It usually makes sense to start with dependent variables, then focus on question predictors, and finally talk about control variables.

Sample

Describe your sample. This will include the number of observations in your sample but also any other details or summary statistics that help us understand the nature of the sample you have collected.. This is an appropriate place to include your tables of univariate and bivariate statistics.

Analytic Plan

The analytic plan should detail all the of the analyses that you perfromed. Typically, this includes specifying the regression model that you've used by writing out the equation. You should mention what type of model you used and you should explain why you believe it is the appropriate method.

Findings

With good preparation a findings section can be very short.

Credit

Much of this material is drawn and adapted from John B. Willett's "Structure of a Scholarly Research Paper."