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Research Workshop Page

This page contains links that will help you in writing your research papers.
More precisely, the sites and articles mentioned should help you in
  • finding a research topic.
  • searching for related literature
  • locating data
  • getting tips on writing papers
  • getting tips on presenting papers

Some General Material


On Plagiarism
Read these Notes on Plagiarism
  • If you use other people's work, acknowledge that you do so and cite their work! Plagiarism is considered very serious misconduct!

On how to write a bibliography
  • You can read chapter 9-12 in Kate Turabian, 'A Manual for Writers of Term Papers, Theses and Dissertations'
How some famous economists work
Also interesting are

A site containing links to everything economists might want to know

Where to find Ideas


Be informed!! So read newspapers, magazines, listen to radio, watch television news, surf on the net, look around you!

Tv-sites Newspapers Magazines Local
Inspiration can also be found by browsing through some recent issues of scientific journals.

Some journals that focus on survey articles: Some top journals Some top research journals dealing with economics of transition
  • Problems of Economic Transition
  • The economics of transition
  • Voprosy Ekonomiki, Russia
  • Ukrainian Economic Review
  • Russian Economic Trends
  • Post-Soviet Affairs
  • Post-Soviet Geography and Economics
  • Post-Communist Economies
  • Economic Policy in Transitional Economies
Some Russian economics journals
An alternative source: the programs of some recent conferences. On these programs, you can get a glimpse of what's hot at this moment in Econland! The May issues of the AEA publishes the papers of some sessions of the previous years AEA meeting Another source is the syllabi of courses
As an Example, some links to courses in transition economics Or check out the homepages of researchers. An example of people working on transition Some 'new' Subfields of Economics, based on Lazear, Edward (2000), 'Economic Imperialism'
Related

The literature search


  • Google (the best search engine of all, used by most economists)
  • Econlit (EERC network - look for WINSPIRS)!
  • Social Science Research Network (a database with working papers written by people from all over the world)
  • BibEc(a database with working papers written by people from all over the world. They are using 'Citeseer' on their database which means that you can see for more and more papers by which papers they are cited)
  • NBER (FULL TEXT papers of network of top-shot economists working in the US)
  • CEPR (papers of network of top-shot economists working in the Europe - FULL TEXT THROUGH EERC MOSCOW ELECTRONIC LIBRARY)
  • ECONBASE The abstracts of articles published in Elsevier journals
  • the EERC library (for books)
  • jstor (the place to find FULL TEXT research published in a number of top journals)
  • jstor at EERC : the elctronic library of EERC Moscow gives access to a larger FULL TEXT JSTOR set of journals (use the library password and login)
  • EBSCO gives access to FULL-TEXT articles of several journals (use the EERC library password and login)
  • EERC faculty (last resort! some faculty members might have access to other databases with published research)
Research Organizations often have their own webpages with their research

Some Economics Research Organizations in Russia

Top organizations Other Russian research organizations
Ukrainian Economic Research Organizations


Economic Research Organizations in Eastern Europe


Research organizations dealing with transition located elsewhere


International research organizations


The Search for Data: Data are everywhere!


Some illustrations:
Some Data on Russian Economy

Writing paper


General: Swales, J. and Feak, C. (2001), 'Academic Writing for Graduate Students', University of Michigan Press. Specific for economics:
  • Donald McCloskey (1985), 'Economical Writing', Economic Inquiry, vol. 23, p.187-222. (I have copy)
  • Donald McCloskey (19xx), 'Economical Writing', book, (I will have copy)
  • Salant, W. (1969), 'Writing and Reading in Economics', Journal of Political Economy, vol. 77, nr. 4, p. 545-558 (in jstor).
  • Thomson, William (1999), 'The Young Person's Guide to Writing Economic Theory', Journal of Economic Literature, vol. 37, p. 157-183 (I have copy).
  • Chapter 1 of Thomson, William (2001), 'A Guide for the Young Economist', MIT Press (I have copy)
  • John Munro's Essay Instructions
  • Laband, .D and Taylor, C. (1992), 'The Impact of Bad Writing in Economics', Economic Inquiry, vol. 30, p. 673-688. + reaction of McCloskey!
  • 'So you want to write an economics paper' by Lawrence H. officer, and Judith and Daniel Saks. (I do not have a copy)
Also:

Presenting a paper


  • Chapter 2 of Thomson, William (2001), 'A Guide for the Young Economist', MIT Press (I have copy)
  • Notes on Presenting a Paper
  • Appendix 18 of Wyrick: 'Guidelines for Giving an Oral Report'

Getting comments



Some additional material


General On the right use of econometrics
  • Griliches, Zvi (1985), 'Data and Econometricians - The Uneasy Alliance', American Economic Review, vol. 75, nr. 2, p. 196-200.
  • Leamer, Edward (1983), 'Let's Take the Con Out of Econometrics', American Economic Review, vol. 73, nr. 1, p. 31-43.
  • Hendry, David (1980) 'Econometrics: Alchemy or Science?', Economica, 47(4), Number 188, November, pp. 387-406
A paper for beginning economists:
  • Leijonhufvud, Axel (1975), 'Life among the Econ', Western Economic Journal, p. 327-337.

Ukrainian State Agencies
Ukrainian Law
International Agencies in Ukraine
Catalog of media in Ukraine

Some notes on the use of ECONLIT


1) Econlit includes abstracts but not by default. To include abstracts
  • go to options
  • select show options
  • choose field (left box): AB-Abstract
  • click on 'add'
  • click OK
Abstracts should appear!
Other information like JEL codes, affiliation of the authors and so can be added in a similar way.

2) Retype option: rather than retyping your search term, click on retype

3) Beware: put 'and' between words, except if it's on term.
For example, compare 'transition economics' to 'transition and economics'

4) Specific searches.
You can limit searches to title, abstract, publication year, source or whatever.
  • Title: add 'in ti' to search term
    Compare 'transition economies in ti' (422 records) to 'transition economies' (956 records).
    The advantage: articles with the search term in the title should have search term as main subject. So it allows you to do a more focused search.
  • Journal Title : add 'in so' to search term (so stands for source )
  • Author : add 'in au' to search term, allows you to select only those papers written by a given author rather than also those that refer to the author.
  • JEL code: add 'in de' to search term (de stands for descriptor code )
  • Journal articles: add 'and journal in dt' to search term (dt stands for document type) to select only journal articles and exclude books and working papers
  • Publication year: add 'and py=1999' or 'and py>1995' if you want to limit your search to a particular period.


Updated: June, 2005