Economist's Craft

The Economist’s Craft: An Introduction to Research, Publishing, and Professional Development Michael S. Weisbach Dedication: “To my students and coauthors, who taught me most of what is in this book.” 1 Table of Contents Preface 1) Introduction – How Academic Research Gets Done Part 1: Topic Selection 2) Selecting Research Topics 3) Strategic Issues in Constructing Research Portfolios Part 2: Writing A Draft 4) An Overview of Writing Academic Papers 5) The Title, Abstract, and Introduction 6) The Body of the Paper: The Literature Review, Theory, Data Description, and Conclusion Sections 7) Reporting Empirical Work 8) Writing Prose for Academic Articles Part 3: Once a Draft Has Been Written: Presentations, Distribution and Publication 9) Making Presentations 10) Distributing, Revising, and Publicizing Research 11) The Journal Review Process Part 4: Being a Successful Academic 12) How to be a Productive Doctoral Student 13) How to be a Diligent Thesis Advisor 14) Managing an Academic Career Epilogue – Academic Success Beyond the PhD Bibliography 2 Preface Purpose of the Book When I moved to Tucson, Arizona in 1994 to teach at the University of Arizona, I started teaching a doctoral course on corporate finance, covering research about the way that firms raise capital, corporate governance, and related issues. In the 26 years since then, I have taught some variant of that course almost every year during my time on the faculties of three different universities. The students in these classes were almost always smart and hard-working, and the vast majority wanted a career as academics themselves. Yet, many did not succeed in that goal. Some were unable to complete their programs, some could not get academic jobs following graduation, and some were unable to publish their work once they became junior faculty. There are a limited number of tenure-track positions in academia, so it is not possible for every entering doctoral student who wants an academic career to have one. To become a productive academic scholar, talent and a drive to succeed are necessary, but are not sufficient. For the majority of young scholars who do not succeed in becoming successful academics, the problem is not a lack of ability or effort. Instead, the problem is that they do not go about their task as graduate students, and then as junior faculty, in the best way. Being a professional scholar is something completely different from almost any other profession, and many people who want to become academics never figure out important aspects of the job. In light of this observation, I started including short segments about how best to approach the task of becoming a successful academic into my doctoral course. I covered topics such as what to spend time on as a doctoral student, starting research programs, motivating papers, writing English prose, presenting research, and acquiring the human capital necessary for a successful career after finishing the dissertation. After a few years, I began to notice that the students were paying more attention during these short segments than they were in the rest of my lectures. Students appeared to be more interested in the advice I 3 had for them about the way they should approach their time in the program and their future careers than what I had to tell them about corporate finance. Doctoral students are always justifiably nervous that they aren’t making optimal use of their time in the program so are almost always very appreciative of whatever guidance they can get from faculty. Over the years, I found a demand for advice came not just from the students I was teaching, but also from students and younger faculty I met as I visited other universities around the world. In fact, the demand for advice is so great that many young scholars even turn to internet message boards, asking for the opinions of anonymous strangers who usually know as little as they do. A second observation I have had over the years is that, perhaps because of a lack of good advice, many scholars, both doctoral students and also faculty members, constantly make the same mistakes. It is far too common that publicly-circulated papers contain incredibly long, mind-numbingly dull literature surveys; introductions that go on and on before they tell the reader what the point of the paper is and why the reader should bother to waste her time on it; data descriptions containing insufficient detail for a third party to replicate the results; tables that are unnecessary, badly labeled, or hard to understand; or overly dry prose written in passive voice that seems designed to put the reader to sleep. In addition, many scholars manage their time so badly when giving presentations that they don’t get to the main results of the paper until the last five minutes of the talk. Their presentations are often poorly designed with slides that are incomprehensible, or even just unreadable due to fonts so small that participants sitting more than a few rows back cannot read them. Young faculty routinely mismanage their careers by not having a coherent research agenda, not getting their papers to journals, or not making connections with people in their own fields who teach at other universities. Sometimes they don’t even bother to show up for seminars in their field at their own universities. Writing papers, making presentations, and communicating with other scholars are basic parts of a professor’s job. Yet, while there are books and courses on how to do almost anything in the world, there is very little written on how to be a successful academic. The irony is that as academics, we spend our lives teaching other people skills for all sorts of non-academic jobs. But rarely does anyone teach us how 4 to do ours. Usually what a scholar has learned about how to do her job is what she’s been lucky enough to absorb from faculty advisors, friends, and colleagues; the rest she figures out on her own. Doctoral programs in economics and related fields usually do a reasonably good job teaching the science involved in research, meaning that programs teach theory, econometrics, and the literatures in applied fields fairly well. Where they are lacking is the way that they teach the craft of research. Like other kinds of craftsmanship, the way to write a research paper can be thought of a craft, involving a combination of time-tested techniques, strategic thinking, imagination, ethics, and attention to details that are often overlooked. The observation that doctoral students and young faculty members often do not learn the craftsmanship necessary to do their jobs well made me think that “someone should write a book explaining to academics how to do research and manage their careers.” After teaching at five research- oriented departments and seeing the success and failure of my students and colleagues, I decided that I would try to be that someone. What you are about to read is my attempt. The purpose of this book is to provide a guide for a scholar who wishes to pursue a career in academia. The primary focus is on research — how a scholar selects research topics, does the analysis, writes her papers, and publishes them—though the book marries research and publishing with professional development. Throughout the book, I encourage scholars to think of each paper as part of a larger research program. A scholar’s goal should be to structure her research so that the profession learns more from her body of collected research than from the sum of the contributions of each individual paper. When writing this book, I tried to make each chapter more or less self-contained, with each covering a different aspect of a scholar’s job. The idea is that whenever a scholar stumbles across an aspect of her job about which she was uncertain, the book would contain a chapter that can help her address the issues she is confronting. So, for example, if a scholar is trying to write the introduction of a paper, she can turn to Chapter 5 and read my discussion about the way to write an effective introduction. Of if she is contemplating how to present her empirical results, she might look to Chapter 7, where I describe ways in which a scholar can present empirical results in a clear and compelling manner. 5 Since my background is in economics and finance, the book is most relevant to scholars working in those fields. For scholars in other fields that might be considered part of the broader economics ecosystem, such as accounting and some aspects of public policy and related social sciences, the book should be equally relevant. My hope is that much of what I say will be valuable to academics working in other fields, and also for non-academics who do research and try to publish it. How the Book Came to Be Much of the book explains the process of writing a paper from the idea stage through publication. It describes the transformation of an idea into a research project, then into a draft of a paper, then through the many revisions prior to submitting it to a journal, then through the further revisions that follow submission, and eventually to acceptance by the journal and publication. It also explains how a scholar should think of each paper as a part of a coherent research program that defines her career, and how she should manage that career to maximize her own welfare. At each step, I present techniques that a scholar can use to accomplish this step of the research project. When writing this book, I tried to approach it as I would a research project, and to utilize the very techniques I was writing about.

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