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| === Introduction === | | === Introduction === |
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| Your introduction should be short: not more than 2-3 pages and 5-6 paragraphs. Your introduction should only seek to do three things (with an optional fourth): | | Your introduction should be short: not more than 2-3 pages and 5-6 paragraphs. Your introduction should only seek to do three things: |
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| # Introduce and motivate your work. What is the topic of this research? Why is this research worth pursuing? | | # Introduce and motivate your work. |
| # Establish the importance, relevance, and impact of your work (what is the research question? why is the question important? what data/methods does the paper use to answer the question?) providing a clear answer to the question, "Why should a reader care?" | | # Establish the importance, relevance, and impact of your work providing a clear answer to the question, "Why should a reader care?" |
| # Foreshadow the key findings and contributions of the study. What do we know now that we did not know before? | | # In the final paragraph, lay out the organization of the rest of the paper. |
| # (Optional) In the final paragraph, lay out the organization of the rest of the paper.
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| === Background === | | === Background === |
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| There is more general advice on the topic of writing an introduction and background section [[CommunityData:Advice on writing a background section to an academic paper|elsewhere on the wiki]] but, given a solid introduction that does its job, your background section should only needs to do two additional things: | | There is more general advice on the topic of writing an introduction and background section\ [[CommunityData:Advice on writing a background section to an academic paper|elsewhere on the wiki]] but, given a solid introduction that does its job, your background section should only needs to do two additional things: |
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| # Define the terms you'll be using in your study. | | # Define the terms you'll be using in your study. |
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| As you write the section, walk folks through the substantive takeaways from your results. Explain how these results support, or provide evidence that fails to support, your hypotheses. Be very explicit. | | As you write the section, walk folks through the substantive takeaways from your results. Explain how these results support, or provide evidence that fails to support, your hypotheses. Be very explicit. |
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| === Threats to Validity / Limitations === | | === Threats to Validity (or Limitations) === |
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| Every study has limitations and important threats to your validity. It's your job to describe all the way that your results are contingent. In particular, make sure you discuss:
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| ;Threats to internal validity: Why might we doubt the results of this work? What assumptions that underly your results may not hold? Why not? What are the threats to construct validity that underly your analysis?
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| ;Threats to external validity: Explain why your work might fail to generalize to other empirical settings or samples?
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| To the extent that you can present evidence, additional analyses, or robustness checks that address these concerns, that's great. To the extent that some of these concerns will be left on the table, it's better for you to foreground these here.
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| Explain why, even with important threats and limitations, you think your work still makes an important contribution.
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| === Discussion === | | === Discussion === |
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| * Summarize your findings.
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| * Connect back to your background and the initial rationale described in the front-end of your paper.
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| * Discuss future research. Don't just say that future research is needed but explain, concretely, ''what particular future work'' would address the limitations of your work described in the previous section.
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| === Bibliography === | | === Bibliography === |
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| Straight-forward enough but read it carefully before you submit. Misspelled authors names don't seem like a huge deal but they can haunt you. The misspelled authors ''will'' notice.
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| === Appendix ===
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| Nearly every journal allows you to have an online appendix.
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| Appendixes can include copy of instruments. longer descriptions of variables or a dataset or the process necessary to collect it, additional robustness checks and tables, commentary on specific analyses. These are unrestricted. Use them.
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| Not every journal allows you to submit these with the paper. If your journal doesn't, you can submit your appendix to [https://figshare.com/ FigShare] which will create an archival version with a DOI that you can cite from your manuscript and which will be maintained by librariand archives going forward.
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| == Tables == | | == Tables == |
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| There are three types of tables that every every quantitative paper should include:
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| ;Univariate statistics: This should include 1-3 tables that describes the mean, median, standard deviation, and range of every variable in your analysis. If you have many categorical or dichotomous variables, you'll probably just want to show proportions and counts.
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| ;Bivariate statistics: In most cases, a simple triangular correlation table output from <code>cor()</code> is enough.
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| ;Regression/model results: This should should be the central piece of evidence presented in your paper. I like the tables produced by <code>screenreg()</code> (or really, <code>texreg()</code> and <code>htmlreg()</code>) in the [https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/texreg/index.html texreg package in R]. [https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/stargazer/index.html stargazer] and [https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/apsrtable/index.html apsrtable] do something very similar.
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| == Credit == | | == Credit == |
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| Much of this material is drawn and adapted from John B. Willett's "Structure of a Scholarly Research Paper." | | Much of this material is drawn and adapted from John B. Willett's "Structure of a Scholarly Research Paper." |