Research Papers: The Brief Guide

The introduction to research paper should start with your central contribution. The major demand for this part of the paper is that it should be easy for perception and understanding. It is very important that people should get the idea of the main point in your subject of research.

Your idea or conclusion should be clear. The first sentence is the most difficult one. The statement alone is usually not enough; it should be underpinned with facts.

Incorrect variant: “My results show that the pecking-order theory is rejected.” (e.g.)

Better variant: “In a regression of x on y, controlling for z, the coefficient is q.” (e.g.)

Also do not start with philosophy:

Incorrect variant: “Financial economists have long wondered if markets are efficient.” (e.g.)

Do not resort to hack phrases to start:

Incorrect variant: “The finance literature has long been interested in x.” (e.g.)

Do not start with long motivation as for importance of your research to public contribution. Your paper on its own rather than the history of public interest to the subject should grasp the interest of people.

Three pages are considered to be good upper limit for the introduction to research.

Literature review

After you have explained your contribution, you can give a short literature review. It should be made in the form of separate section so that people could skip it case they want to. People are mostly not interested in the literature you have read or used to prepare your research; moreover, many of them might not know the literature on the subject of your research at all.

The last statement also gives the reason not to cite every single paper in your literature or scientific journal style review. The main goal of any literature review is to be outlined against 2 or 3 current papers in the same field. Do not forget to give proper credit to the other authors’ achievements and main points that you might refer to in your research paper.

You are free to devote a page and a half to the literature review.

Body of the paper

The main point of this section is to approach the public to the main result of your paper as closer as possible. Please, escape the mistake that most of the authors do. You should not resort to the things that are usually ignored and distract from the subject of the paper. They are: long motivation and literature or scientific style journal review, descriptive statistics, side discussions, preliminary results, etc.

Theory

The main result of each research paper is empirical work. The theory in the research paper is only auxiliary instrument in understanding of your empirical work, not more. It is the empirical result rather than theory that expands public knowledge in some field.

Empirical work

The central result is what you should start with. Extra information like, let’s say, extensive data description, reproduction of others’ work or preliminary estimates are not welcomed here. If they are really a matter of big importance you should better put them into a separate section that will come afterwards or into appendix.

When it is hard to resist to the temptation, please, at least do not put any information which is not helpful to the pubic before the central result.

The central result should be followed with graphs and tables that give intuition of your empirical work. Follow them with short responses to the potential criticisms of your point of view.

Conclusions

If you have succeeded in getting your message across to the public, you can miss the conclusions. The practice shows that only those who failed to explain their ideas at the very beginning skip to the conclusion to accent all over again on the same idea.

Anyway, one should remember that those conclusions should be short. There is no need to restate all your findings. Use one statement in the abstract, one statement in the introduction, and one in the body of the paper, and that will be enough.

Your conclusion may also consist of a paragraph or two (not more) where you give a note of all your plans for future research work. Though be careful and do not speculate here, as people would prefer to learn the results rather than your opinion.

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