Writing in the Sciences

General references

McCloskey, D. (1985), “Economical writing”. Economic Inquiry, 23: 187–222, http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1465-7295.1985.tb01761.x/abstract

Hamermesh, D.S. (1992): “The young economist’s guide to professional etiquette”, Journal of Economic Perspective, 6(1), pp. 169-179, https://www.aeaweb.org/articles.php?doi=10.1257/jep.6.1.169

Kristin Sainani “Writing in the Sciences”

• https://www.coursera.org/course/sciwrite
• https://class.stanford.edu/courses/Medicine/SciWrite/Fall2013/about
• http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUk4uy2jPpXVGXqVhgs352q6jOdI608Qg

Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association

• http://www.apastyle.org/manual/
• http://www.amazon.de/Publication-Manual-American-Psychological-Association/dp/1433805618

 

 

Writing mathematical relations and models

Thomson, W. (1999): “The young person’s guide to writing economic theory”, Journal of Economic Literature, 37(1), pp.157-183, https://www.aeaweb.org/articles.php?doi=10.1257/jel.37.1.157
Varian, H.R. (1997): “How to build an economic model in your spare time”, http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~hal/Papers/how.pdf

 

Tools

Issue 1: Procrastination

Pomodoro technique: 20mn work, 10 mn relaxing, 20mn work, …
http://www.tomighty.org/

Issue 2: Inefficiency

Mostly because one does not know where one’s time goes
http://www.rescuetime.com
Records the time spent on the computer by software category

Issue 3: Discouragement

http://idonethis.com
To record what you did, not what you need to get done.

Issue 4: Forgetting

You might feel that you included all that was required in your paper, but think again!
Swan – Scientific Writing Assistant http://cs.uef.fi/swan/

Issue 6: Organization

Logical structure of the document, insertion of references in the correct place
Mindmaps: http://www.xmind.net/ or http://freemind.sourceforge.net/

Issue 7: Revisions

The issue is people becoming too attached to their paper
A good and fun way to destroy and re-construct a paper is to print it, cut it, and paste it back, for real!

 

Choosing an outlet

• Top journals vs Field journals
• There are many ranking lists:
  • http://www.scimagojr.com/journalrank.php?area=2000 (for economics, econometrics and finance)
  • http://www.harzing.com/jql.htm (Journal quality list for Economics, Finance, Accounting, Management, and Marketing)
  • http://tool.handelsblatt.com/tabelle/?id=33 (Handelsblatt)
  • https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=top_venues&hl=en&vq=bus (Google Scholar)
• Your university will also probably have its own ranking list
• Look into what journals your adviser published in, what journals people you cite published in.

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