Research Paper Guidelines and Research Methods

Author: Lin Guijun
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2004-09-01
Features: After years of practical work, we have deeply felt that providing students with high-quality courses and good research training opportunities is two important aspects of ensuring the quality of university education. Under the pressure of China's reform and opening-up, the School of International Economics and Trade at the University of International Business and Economics has made significant progress in providing courses after nearly a decade of continuous development, establishing a curriculum system with international standards. The research capabilities of the faculty have also made breakthrough progress, with an increasing number of research results of international standards being produced. However, compared to this, we are still slightly lagging in providing students with research training opportunities. For many years, we have hoped for a guide-like resource to assist students in writing papers, using it as a means to improve the current lagging situation in research training. With the continuous improvement of educational standards, the expansion of enrollment, and the pressure of international economic competition, students' demands for higher paper quality have become increasingly strong. This book is written in response to current issues and aims to achieve three objectives: first, to standardize the writing format of papers, making students' paper structures more standardized, while also improving paper management efficiency; second, to help students grasp the basics of writing a standardized paper suitable for academic journals; third, to introduce the standardized research process of papers, enabling students to learn how to conduct research. The primary motivation for writing this book was to standardize the papers of undergraduates and master's students at the School of International Economics and Trade, requiring students to refer to the norms defined in the book for their research and writing. In fact, most of the content in this book is also suitable for the writing of course papers and doctoral theses in universities. Additionally, we hope that the information conveyed in this book will not only help students improve their ability to publish papers in domestic academic journals but also provide some assistance in writing papers accepted by international academic journals. Improving students' research capabilities requires multiple factors, among which providing good research training opportunities is one of the keys. Through this process, students acquire the skills needed for research activities, such as selecting and defining research topics, searching and filtering literature, collecting and analyzing data, applying theoretical and analytical tools to solve practical problems, conducting rigorous reviews, and reporting their research findings in a standardized format. This concept has had a significant impact on the writing of this book, and we hope it becomes an element that serves the overall goal of research training. "Academic misconduct occurs without rules," "academic chaos in China has a very serious extent and increasingly becomes a major obstacle to China becoming a world economic powerhouse. Careful observation reveals that distorted academic norms encourage many highly intelligent individuals to seek research shortcuts that easily produce 'performance,' spending vast amounts of time and effort on repetitive work and generating low-value research outcomes, ultimately leading to a huge waste of social resources. For a long time, we have noticed two main issues in students' paper writing: first, a lack of understanding of academic writing rules, particularly in terms of copyright awareness, the use of literature and footnotes, and the adopted writing style; second, students' vague understanding of how to conduct academic research. In reality, papers are an important form of reporting research results in a standardized manner, but many students conflate research with writing, mistakenly believing that research is simply writing day and night, reflecting their weakness in research method training. This book includes two main parts: paper norms and research proposals. It first discusses how to organize each part of the paper and the required formatting standards based on the standard academic journal paper model. The reason for choosing the academic journal paper model is that this type of paper emphasizes innovation, which helps cultivate students' academic innovation awareness. Second, academic journal papers tend to conduct in-depth research on a specific issue, with the content of the entire paper generally revolving around this main thread. Explanations of concepts not directly related to the topic in the paper, as well as known knowledge, are either placed in the references, footnotes, or appendices through citations and notes or are simply omitted, making the paper concise and focused. Previously, our students' papers were very long, containing a lot of knowledge not directly related to the topic, while the main part of the paper was relatively weak. By condensing and refining the content of the paper, the author can focus on showcasing the core content of the paper; at the same time, when teachers evaluate the quality of papers, they avoid spending a lot of time reading repetitive knowledge. Finally, the academic journal paper model is the most advanced form of reporting research results in academia. It has gradually developed on the basis of other writing styles or paper formats. Mastering this writing format will also be very helpful for writing other types of research reports. To better equip students with the basic skills needed for research, this book also introduces the writing of research proposals, discussing in depth the conception of paper topics, literature reviews, and methods for solving paper problems. This book emphasizes that a research proposal is a nearly academically valuable research work that emerges from in-depth research, which poses a significant challenge to our current research proposal model and substantially raises the evaluation standards for research proposals. Papers and research proposals are two closely linked stages in the research process, with many similarities. During the writing of this book, we have made efforts to reduce the repetition between these two parts. To fully understand the research process of papers, students should give equal importance to both parts. This book cannot solve all the problems students encounter in paper writing. A more important method for learning to write papers is "learning by doing," repeatedly referencing others' approaches. Paper writing is also a process of identifying and solving problems, through which students' research and paper writing skills will undergo a leap forward. The research and paper writing models proposed in this book may present significant challenges to students, but they should strive in this direction. Through rigorous and long-term training, they will certainly become well-trained professionals, which is also our ultimate aspiration for writing this book. The content of this book has gradually taken shape alongside the research development of the School of International Economics and Trade. From 1996 to 1997, in response to the then-lagging research development of the school, we sent eight teachers in two batches to the University of Manchester in the UK for training in research methods. In the following years, we also invited a group of domestic and international scholars to our school to give lectures on research methods to the faculty. These scholars included: Paul Cook and Pred Nixson from the University of Manchester, Jong-Heum Park from Kennesaw State University, Tan Hui from the University of Bath, Wang Zengqi from the University of Leeds, Michael Thorpe and Lan Brown from Curtin University of Technology, Oded Shenkar from Ohio State University, Zou Shaoming from the University of Missouri (Columbia), Zhang Honglin from the University of Illinois, Edward Miller from the University of New Orleans, Guo Lin from Suffolk University, Francisco Rivera-Batiz, Zhang Liwen, and Han Zhaohong from Columbia University, Xu Jian from Kenyon College, and Wang Shouyang from the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The knowledge contributed by these scholars has not only greatly improved the understanding of research methods among the faculty of the school and laid the foundation for the publication of this book but has also greatly enriched its content.