Research paper content: a student guide

My earlier post on research paper structuring described how many economic research papers are structured. This post talks a little about the content of papers. It may help to keep the ideas coming when writing papers and essays.

The structure of many research papers, as mentioned, is along the lines of

1. Research questions
2. Their importance
3. Other people's work
4. Plan
5. Theory
6. Applied specification
7. Empirical method
8. Inputs
9. Outputs
10. Discussion in the paper's context
11. Discussion in a wider context

The structure also often repeats internally within sections.

The sections typically contain small advances for the whole paper, followed by extensive consolidation relative to earlier sections. So, in the inputs section for example, the use of a particular source of data will be discussed, in terms of content like:

whether it provides good data to help answer questions (relating to metasection 1)
whether other people have used the data before (relating to metasection 3)
the innovations in the current paper's usage (relating to metasection 3)
how it is inserted in an empirical specification (such as by averaging, or removing poor quality data, or that sort of thing) (relating to metasection 6)

and so on. All the discussion emerges from a single statement like "we will use World Bank data". Similarly in the outputs section, a results table might be discussed in terms of

whether questions are answered
whether the specification has influenced the results
whether theory is correct
if there are any changes when the data source changes

and so on. Usually the discussions are relative to sections which have already been undertaken, for obvious reasons of comfort for the reader.

The points above do not complete research papers by themselves, but they help avoid the "my research paper is complete at 200 words but has got to be 20000 words" feeling.