Writing A Research paper in Political Science chaps 1-3

1. draft question
2. sharpen question, write literature reviews
3. anaylisis and assesment
4. rework proceding parts of paper, develop conclusions, introductions, titles

1. develop topic & question and find sources
2. identify, classify, explain, and evaluate sources
3. develop a thesis
4. develop a model and hypothesis
5. revise
6. edit
7. plan the study (identify appropriate cases to study)
8. Evaluate the hypothesis or thesis
9. write conclusion
10. write introduction

-communicates question and thesis
-entices people to read paper
-provides a roadmap/snapshot of entire paper

1. topics are too broad
2. a question links you to a controversy
3. forces you to provide an answer

1. interesting
2. important
3. direct
4. short
5. doable
6. puzzling

when students seek to describe everything they have learned from other research

policymakers, scholars, citizens

suprising given what we know
typically means linking something empirical with your topic of interest

to what extent
what impact
given —-, why is
given —-, how is
how or under what conditions is
why

1. is there correlation? Causation?
2. extent to which the research helps to solve a particular problem
3. what the nature of the evidence is

insight that some effect varies with some other factor

applied

seeks to move our conceptual understandings forward, identifying weaknesses and strengths in existing approaches
-encouraged to do this type of research in most empirical courses

encouraged to do this type of research in theory class

questions inspired by phenomena of importance in the real world that require you to use theory and evidence to answer them

1. uncover authors and sources that are most important
2. locate multiple competing arguments
3. understand precisely the implications of differing claims

APA or Chicago

attibute ideas, information, as well as quotes and data to original authors

a summary of the arguments of a work as well as key information about the cases and the findings

scholars tend to be proffesors working at universities
or employed at think-tanks, public policy, or governmental institutions
-scholarly journals tend to have footnotes and bibliographies

edited volumes that contain a collection of articles written by different authors and course packs

1. perform search using Online Library of Congress or your reaserch universities library
-the dots in front of the authors name indicate how relevant the search results are going to be given the terms used
-if the authors name appears first, and then again after the title then it is not an anthology
2. The titles are hypertext and you can click on them for more information
3. the publication date is provided (better to use more recent sources)

Paradigm Publishers
Yale university press
CQ Press
W.W Norton
Rowman & Littlefeild
Routledge
Lynne Rienner

scholarly work on a relatively narrow topic

displayed by clicking on the hypertext that follows \”LCCN Permalink\”
shows chapters thus giving you a greater sense of what the book focuses on
allows you to find other works written by the author

Academic Search Primer
ProQuest
Projet MUSE
JSTOR
search using key concepts and others you found while searching OLC
database searching gives you abstracts that summarize the article

Interest Based- assert that actors make decisions that maximize their priorities

Institutional- focus on the rules and structures of institutions and show that these established routines or patterns have an impact on outcomes

Ideas- a catchall term for ideas, identities, cultures

Economic- or socioeconomic

1.) research question
2.) sources (written as bibliographic entries in a uniform matter)
3.) summaries of the sources and their arguments
4.) characterize the School (give the approach a label)