Structure of a quantitative empirical research paper

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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

There is more general advice on the topic of writing an introduction and background section\ elsewhere on the wiki but, given a solid introduction that does its job, your background section should only needs to do two additional 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. Done well, it is nothing more than a coherent argument that presents your research questions and the rationale that lies behind them. That's it.

The background section should end with your hypothesis or hypotheses. If you have several distinct hypotheses, it might make sense to create subsections of your background for each hypothesis. Then you can end each subsection with the hypothesis itself.

Research Design

This section should present details of how you carried out your study. Usually, it will includes subsections that touch on each of the following items (although not every item needs it's own subsection, it's fine if they have them):

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.


Threats to Validity (or Limitations)

Discussion

Bibliography

Tables

Credit

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