How To: Conceptual Articles

[adel9216]

Hello,

any resources on how to write a conceptual article in the social sciences? I have a parking lot of ideas/gaps/article topics in a Trello board. They're all relevant ideas I believe. I leave them be for now. But one day, I need to pick one of those ideas and turn it into a solid scientific article and I don't know how to do that at all.

I have the book How to write a Scientific Article in 12 weeks but does anyone have shorter, other resources as well?

Thanks

[Puget]

I'm not sure I know what you mean by "conceptual article"-- do you mean a theory article (i.e., not an empirical article or review article)? If so, at least in my field those are generally invited articles by senior researchers, not something a grad student would publish. Establish yourself by publishing your empirical research first.

[adel9216]

I'm not sure I know what you mean by "conceptual article"-- do you mean a theory article (i.e., not an empirical article or review article)? If

Yes.

Do you recommend co-authoring with an established researcher? One members of my thesis committee said I should give it a shot. I just don't know how to do that and I feel it'd require a lot of work given my lack of experience.

Because I see a lot of opportunities to publish in my field, but I let most of them go because I am not sure my articles would be strong enough as a sole author.

[Puget]

I'm not sure I know what you mean by "conceptual article"-- do you mean a theory article (i.e., not an empirical article or review article)? If

Yes.

Do you recommend co-authoring with an established researcher? One members of my thesis committee said I should give it a shot. I just don't know how to do that and I feel it'd require a lot of work given my lack of experience.

Because I see a lot of opportunities to publish in my field, but I let most of them go because I am not sure my articles would be strong enough as a sole author.

Sure, if your advisor wants to get you involved in a paper as a co-author that's fine, but if you're in an empirical social science field, you need to be concentrating on publishing empirical research as first author and developing your program of research. Your development of theory should come from your original research--- It's not something to try to pull out of thin air before you have the research to back it up.

[polly_mer]

Ask the person who is encouraging you to give you mentoring through the whole process.  If they refuse, then that's an answer on what you should do right now.

I have to wonder once again about the things you must be doing to stay on track to graduate (qualifier, dissertation proposal and research) versus things that take energy and effort, but aren't on the path to a successful PhD completion.

If your committee will provide the mentoring, then you're probably OK.

If this is essentially an unfunded mandate, then let the ideas remain on the board for now in favor of higher priority activities.

[Sun_Worshiper]

If you are determined to do this, then my advice is to read and emulate articles that do something like what you are envisioning.  However, I agree with the posters above that this is probably not the best use of your time at this point in your career.

[nonsensical]

A few people I know have found reverse outlining helpful. Like Sun_Worshiper says, find a paper of the kind that you want to write, read it, and create an outline that could have served as the basis of that paper. That might give you a sense of the structure of the paper. You could do that for a few theory papers and then outline your own paper based on the reverse outlines you've created. For instance, if all of your reverse outlines show a section highlighting previous data on topic X, another section highlighting previous data on topic Y, and a third section showing how these different pieces of data are related, your own paper should probably do something similar.

In terms of whether or not such a paper is worth your time, I think theory papers can be helpful to write if they're paired with something else that you'd need to do anyway. For instance, I once wrote a theory paper from a grant proposal. The beginning part of the grant proposal needed to review prior literature, but writing all of that out didn't "count" (the grant counted on my CV, but the submission itself didn't count, and I wouldn't have gotten anything from it if the funding hadn't come through). I took the basic things that I had written in the proposal, elaborated on them, and submitted that as a paper that became a separate line on my CV. I recently wrote a different theory paper because I wanted to learn more about a particular sub-area in my field. My theory paper highlighted how that sub-area could inform a different sub-area with which I am much more familiar. I learned a great deal about the new-to-me sub-area while writing that paper, which is something I wanted to do anyway, but just learning something doesn't give me credit on my CV. Writing the paper helped me do something I was going to do anyway in a way that "counted." If you're writing a traditional dissertation, it's possible that the introduction could be turned into a theory paper, and/or that writing a theory paper could help you learn a literature that you needed to learn anyway. I agree with others that empirical papers are particularly helpful for students, so if you're going to write a theory paper I'd make sure that it's helping you do something that you would have done anyway even without the paper.