Research paper structuring: a student guide

Part of the difficulty of reading and writing research papers is knowing where to get started with them. Even smart students with lots to say can struggle to begin or maintain their impetus.

The problem in economics should be less than in some other disciplines. Modern economics is primarily scientific in its approach and methods, and the structure of research papers (though not always the content, thankfully!) is highly standardised. Although I do not mark down papers which deviate from academic structuring so long as the student shows evidence of being able to make the structure take whatever form they wish, many markers do reduce grades and students may find the following points helpful for that and other reasons.

A typical theoretical or empirical paper in a leading journal usually is structured overall according to a form like:

1. Statement of research questions answered
2. Their importance
3. Other people's work on the questions
4. Plan
5. Theory
6. Specification of applied theory
7. Method of applied analysis
8. Inputs to analysis
9. Outputs from analysis
10. Interpretation of results in the model's context
11. Interpretation of results in the wider context

The structures are usually fairly clear from chapter headings, although not all of them occur in every paper. Their internal repetition within research papers and their subsections should not be understated. For example, in the section on the method of applied analysis, the structuring might go:

A research question from the earlier theoretical work (analogy to section 1)
Statement of other people's applied approaches to the question (analogy to section 3)
Statement of methods to use (analogy to section 7)
Comments on theoretical and other aspects of the methods (analogy to section 8)
Rationalisation of usage (analogy to section 10)
Robustness checks (analogy to section 11)

Even within paragraphs the structure can occur. For example, when a paper is discussing someone else's research paper, their research questions might be stated, then their method, then their results, then the limitations of the work. That's sections 1, 7, 9, and 11.

The observations above should take a bit of the worry out of writing research papers. There's still the content to find though!