Read Princeton's Guide to Economic Research: Topic Selection, Publication and Academic Career Management: How to Study
Good book recommendation
★★★★★
To do scholarship is to engage in academic research, and professors and researchers who make a career out of learning are called scholars. Among the various industries in the social division of labor, learning is a small industry. But as long as you are engaged in a professional, technical occupation, you always need to have a degree, whether it is a bachelor's, master's or doctorate. In order to get a degree, you will have to write a dissertation. And when writing a dissertation, you are "doing research". No matter what profession you are engaged in, everyone must have an academic experience.
From how to write a good dissertation and how to achieve academic attainments in a lifetime, it is important for everyone. Successful scholars often talk about their success in their memoirs, and many scholars' biographies also write about their experiences as scholars. Everyone has their own experience of success and failure, but it is difficult for us to copy and summarize the only way to succeed that can be applied everywhere. However, there will always be some common problems encountered in doing research, and there will always be some methods for reference. The book "Princeton Economic Research Guide: Topic Selection, Publication and Academic Career Management" (hereinafter referred to as "Princeton Economic Research Guide") published by World Book Publishing Company is a summary of the common points of learning.
Whether it is a professional scholar or a person who is only working on a dissertation, the choice of research topic is extremely important, and it can even be said that the topic determines success or failure. Anyone who is a scholar knows that the importance of the topic can be likened to "men are afraid of choosing the wrong profession, and women are afraid of marrying the wrong man". When you do learning, you are afraid of choosing the wrong question.
The "Topic Selection" section of the book "Princeton Guide to Economic Research" consists of two chapters, and the second chapter, "Choosing a Research Topic", is more important. At the outset, the authors point out that "coming up with a good research question is often the most difficult and important part of a researcher's job". The authors propose three principles for how to choose a topic: First, a problem that is far from fully understood based on the existing literature should be solved, and researchers should have the opportunity to make meaningful contributions to the problem. The second is something that researchers think is interesting and fun. The third is to choose the topic according to their own ability, no matter how good the topic is without the ability to write, ability is the basis for success in learning.
The author is indeed a "veteran" of learning, so he puts forward many points worth noting. For example, he argues that "concentrating on a relatively narrow set of problems." That is to say, the topic must be small in order to go deeper, and the smaller the topic, the more fruitful it will be.
Whether writing a dissertation or a lifelong scholar, the author stresses the need to "be an academic hunter, not an academic farmer", and "the 'hunter' knows what he wants to accomplish, what problems he wants to solve, and what methods he wants to use". The "hunters" are "forward-looking and proactive", and "the 'farmers' respond passively, and they are motivated by the work of others".
Once you've chosen a topic, the real work begins. The study of any topic requires a lot of analysis, including doing experiments, solving models, and evaluating equations. In fact, modern economics has borrowed the methods of natural sciences and applied mathematics, which has become the mainstream. If your work is to be recognized by the academic community and your dissertation can be passed, you must use this method. In Princeton's Guide to Economic Research, the author's focus is on "organizing the paper well and having the skills to write it in the most efficient way possible." According to my understanding, "well-organized paper" is the structure of the whole article, and "craft" is how to express it perfectly. Writing a paper is not only about making your thoughts and opinions clear, but also about the evaluator or more generally the recipient or a more personal reader. In the book, the essay achieves five goals: to clearly state the idea of the paper so that the reader finds it novel and interesting, to convince the reader that the analysis is correct and to try to cope with other explanations, to give credit to others, to provide details of the research process, and to draw appropriate conclusions.
For those who do learning, titles, abstracts, and introductions are like condensed essences. In Chapter 5, "Title, Abstract, and Introduction," the Princeton Guide to Economic Research, the author argues that the title should be the first advertisement for the paper, and that "the abstract is another advertisement for the paper," focusing on what the paper will entic. The "Introduction" is the most frequently read section, so take the time to think about it and write it well. To that end, he suggested that the "Introduction" should cover a lot of information and be easy to read and understand.
To do scholarship and write papers, the subject is the key. Chapter 6 of the book, "The Body of the Paper: Literature Review, Theory, Data Description, and Conclusion", introduces the writing of the main body of the paper, which is highly enlightening. According to the authors, the purpose of a "literature review" is twofold: to give the reader an idea of what has been done in the industry so that the reader can better understand the contribution of the paper, and to acknowledge the work done by other authors and acknowledge their contributions. Different "theoretical" parts are written differently, but generally "start with the simple parts and then add the complex ones". In practice, it is best to be able to use real-world examples to illustrate the model. The best way to "describe the data" depends on the data being 100% accurate. Finally, summarizing the paper with a simple "conclusion" can also look forward to future research ideas.
There are always some common rules and common practices in learning. To a certain extent, reading relevant books can broaden your horizons on the road to study. This is because those common laws and common practices are a perfect combination of theory, experience, and practice.
【Liang Xiaomin】
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