Whether you are a young scholar, a doctoral student or a graduate student preparing for a Ph.D., this article is a must-read classic blog post on your research road to share experience.
The first problem encountered when doing research is choosing the topic. We must first distinguish the difference between the topic and the question. Often students will ask me how to do a research, and I will ask him what question he wants to study? Students will list some key words, such as education, agriculture, etc. These keywords are not strictly a question for you to research. Keywords are just topics that you are researching, and they are still far away from specific questions that you are researching. After completing the distance from topic to question, you have taken the first step of the research and can really start a research. The following three aspects should be paid attention to when selecting the topic.
First, what are you interested in
If you are not interested in a problem, it is difficult for you to make excellent research. A master student once said to me, “Mr. Uzair, you have a lot of ideas, just give me one and I will do it.” I told him, I cannot help you, before you are interested in this issue. In the process of studying, students will certainly be interested in certain questions. Sometimes you will have this kind of experience. When you see an article, you feel excited, sometimes you do not. This is the difference in interest. A person’s interests are related to his accumulation, reading and personal experience.
On the way here, colleague said something to me, and I very much agree: “Great love can have great wisdom.” How do you understand this sentence? When you are doing a research, you must prove that your research is important. How to demonstrate the importance of the research question? It is the research on this issue that can improve human society and bring welfare to humankind. Continue to ask, where does such a problem come from? It depends on whether we can transcend our personal joy and lose our attention to the future and destiny of the entire society. This is the source of interest. A good economist should have a strong sense of humanistic care and social responsibility. The starting point of a good research is a good question, which is more than half of success. In this sense, being a human being and being a learned person are the same. If you do not pay attention to issues that are important to the general public, you will not be able to do excellent knowledge; if you want to fight for fame and gain every day, you will not be able to do excellent research, because the issues you care about are not relevant to most people.
Second, you have to understand the problem
Choose the aspects that you think are important. Mathematics cannot tell you, what is important. ‘What is important’ depends on your own understanding. After determining the research direction, you should focus on smaller aspects according to your own understanding. For example, in all aspects related to the three rural issues, if you feel that the land issue is the most critical, you have already taken a step forward. Next, you think that focusing on “how to make rural laborers lose their land and obtain social security after they move to cities in the process of industrialization and urbanization” is an important research topic. If you start from the three rural issues, narrow it down to the land issue, and then narrow it down to “how to use land for security”, you have already transitioned from topic to question.
Third, why do you concern about importance?
It is mainly reflected in two aspects: theoretically important and practically important. The best research is both. I cannot rule out some outstanding articles that are important in theory but not important in practice, or research that is important in practice but not important in theory, especially those in economics that have pioneering work in methodology, often academic and theoretical value without direct social practical significance.
The above three aspects need to be explained one by one when you do a research or write a thesis. Many of our classmates understand doing research as constructing a mathematical or quantitative model and do not pay much attention to “writing”. You have completed the math work and the measurement work. I want to remind you that maybe your research work is only 30% completed, at most 30%. Because you haven’t told us why it is important.
The current division of labor in social sciences, especially economics, is very detailed. So if you get one hundred articles, you may not understand the content of the ninety-nine articles at all, so which of the remaining ninety-nine articles do you read? When we usually read an article, we first look at the abstract. It will tell you what he has studied and what contributions he has made. Then look at the introduction to answer the previous questions in more detail. Finally, look at the conclusion and see what creative content this research has. Finally, look at the main part of the article, the theoretical and empirical models. If your abstract and introduction are not well written, when others see 500 words, they will not read your article. If you don’t pay attention to these, your research may not produce the social value it should have, so you must pay attention to it, and it may even take 70% of the time to write the introduction.
Once you find a question that you find interesting, innovative, and meaningful, then you need to judge whether it is feasible? Whether it is feasible in theory, first of all depends on whether the starting point is correct. Mathematics cannot tell you whether the starting point is right. For the study of a problem, you can use either a static model or a dynamic model. You can adopt a multi-period model or a single-period model. You can adopt a model with or without government. It depends on your understanding of this problem.
A more common problem is evidence. Maybe you have a very good idea. Is there any data to consider? Is there enough financial capacity to obtain the data to support this research? Secondly, we must consider whether the variables needed for research are measurable, at least in theory, whether someone has proposed an excessive amount of method. It is also necessary to consider whether the data sample is large enough. For example, time series data requires at least 30 observation points, but China’s reform and opening up has only 28 years since 1978. Using annual data can only be a solution. These issues must be thought beforehand.
