Posted: December 10th, 2014

Relationship of Russia To The Rest of The BRICs and The BRICs Reaction To Russian Foreign Aggression

Relationship of Russia To The Rest of The BRICs and The BRICs Reaction To Russian Foreign Aggression

Order Description

Students will write a research paper related to one or more of the three topics around which the course is structured: poverty and growth; trade, finance and international diplomacy; or governance and the rule of law. The purpose of the paper is to provide students with a deeper understanding of relevant political, social and economic issues in the BRICS countries.

20 pages, well researched, proof of evidence, and making a central argument about how the other BRICs feel about Russian foreign policy and its effect on the BRICS structure as a whole

Emmanuel Teitelbaum
George Washington University

SOME TIPS ON HOW TO STRUCTURE AN APPLIED RESEARCH PAPER*

The following are a set of guidelines for writing an applied academic research paper.  The central purpose of these guidelines is to get you to think about the design/structure/form of the paper apart from its substance.  It is crucial to recognize that good ideas do not automatically translate into good papers.  Oftentimes papers are their own worst enemies.  A paper’s structure and presentation can confuse the reader to the extent that s/he wholly misinterprets an author’s main point or simply stops reading out of frustration.

This gives rise to the first guideline: do not expect your reader to be sympathetic, patient or kind.  Most readers, including referees and professors, are at best disinterested. This makes it absolutely essential to make your main point crystal clear.

This brings us to our second and most important guideline:  papers should focus on one main point.  Papers that go off on too many tangents end up confusing the reader and obscure the author’s central argument.  Referees and journal editors will always prefer a narrow paper that effectively answers an important question to a paper that elaborates every detail but is likely to be ignored.  Bottom line: don’t try to show off everything you know!  Instead, focus on motivating and shedding light on one narrowly focused question.  If your idea/theory has several implications, focus on one and save the others for another paper.

One way to test whether your paper is focused enough is to try to summarize the main argument in a paragraph.  If you cannot, then you need to think about the central argument a bit more before sitting down to write.  If you can do this, then you are on your way.  Plus, you have just written a draft of your abstract!

After you write your draft abstract, it is time to think about how to structure your paper:

Part 1.  Introduction The introduction is the single most important part of your paper.  If your reader is confused by the introduction or concludes that the paper is not important or interesting, she is not likely to read or remember the paper. And, if she does read on, she is less likely to get the main point.  To capture the reader’s attention, every introduction should do four things:

1.  State the puzzle or central question that will be answered in the paper.

2.  Discuss previous work and identify what deficiencies need to be corrected.  These can include confusion over the facts, theoretical errors, some unanswered question or an empirical puzzle that the existing literature fails to explain.

Crucially, when reviewing relevant literature, you should only address portions of that literature that help to motivate your very particular question.  While it is important to cover all relevant literature, it is not necessary to go into extensive detail about what individual authors have said.  Assume an expert audience and remember that what you are reviewing has already been written.  If a reader wants more details about a particular article or book, she can always reference the original work.   The quickest way to lose your reader is to write a lengthy, boring lit. review!

3.  State your contribution to the literature, i.e. how you will address the problem or solve the puzzle you have identified. Give the reader a sense of how you shed light on the problem; provide some confidence that if she reads the rest of your paper, she might actually learn something.

4.  Provide the reader with a roadmap in the last paragraph of the intro:  “This paper proceeds as follows.  In section 1. . .” etc.

Part 2. Theory.  Discuss your basic approach, theory or framework.  Use short examples or illustrations to make your point.  As with your lit. review, your theory section should be closely related to your central argument/main point.  Avoid wandering into theoretical la-la land, i.e. do not develop theory for its own sake.  Instead, develop only as much theory as you need to solve the puzzle presented in the introduction.  This section should not contain all of the implications of your approach; only those necessary to make your main point!!

Part 3.  Application This is the heart of most papers.  Here you must show why your theory is relevant to the problem and demonstrate its analytical leverage.  Put simply, this section resolves the problem stated in the introduction and provides some reason that the reader should believe your solution (e.g., cases, examples, or statistical tests).

Part 4.  Conclusions.  State the main point once again.  This can be in question/answer form or simply a short discussion of the problem and your answer.  “In this paper, we have shown that. . .”  Summarize for the reader your main insight and why you were able to do something that no one else has.  You may also wish to point out some of the limitations of your argument or some of its additional implications.

Like the introduction, the conclusion should be self-contained.  Many readers will only read the intro and conclusion, so you will want to make sure they can get the point just by reading them alone.

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