20 Pointers for Conducting and Publishing Research Lawrence D. Brown Presentation at Temple University March 12, 2015

Identify your most productive time of day and conduct your research during this time. Devote some time to your research every day. Love the research you are doing when you first get started on it. You will love it less as your work on it progresses. Be careful not to turn your attention away from this project onto the next new research idea.

Be sure to answer the three Kinney (1986 The Accounting Review) questions early on in your paper: “What is the problem,” “Why is it important,” and “How will it be solved?”

Select topics of interest to the target journal. Papers are more suitable to some journals than others. You should reference papers published in the journal to which you are submitting. Make it clear why your work is important to your target audience. Don’t just say your study is interesting or important. It must make a significant incremental contribution to be published in a premier journal.

Seek comments of experts in your field before submitting for possible publication. One excellent way to do this is to present it at workshops, both your own school’s and those of nearby schools. See Brown (January 2005 The Accounting Review).

Determine your comparative advantage, play to your strength and address your weaknesses by improving skills or getting co-authors with skills you lack or prefer not to cultivate. When working with co-authors, carefully lay out each co-author’s responsibilities.

Set deadlines, both when conducting initial research and revising papers. Go to research meetings and conferences to network and obtain research ideas. Be persistent, but do not be foolish. Know when to submit a research paper, and when to abandon a project.

Form is important: check references, tables, grammar. Write in a scientific manner. Beware of ‘hot topics’ but your research needs to be timely and relevant. Write your abstract, introduction and conclusions sections last. Or write a quick draft of the introduction and move on to the rest of the paper.

Be focused and write your paper simply. You should strive to write in such a way that most readers agree on the main points of your paper. Know how to respond to reviewers and editors. Do what you can to satisfy their concerns. Don’t argue with reviewers/editor and don’t do ‘new things’ they did not ask.

Do not adopt the ‘24 hour rule,’ sending a paper to another journal a day after it is rejected. Carefully consider the reviewers’ and editor’s comments before submitting your paper to a different journal. Reviewers make at least some valuable comments. There is also a non-trivial chance that you encounter the same reviewer at the ‘next’ journal.

Do not write much of your paper before obtaining some results. Similarly, do not obtain lots of results before starting to write your paper. Writing the paper will help you determine what additional results to procure. Obtaining results will help you determine how to write the paper.

Do not begin revising your paper until you have read the reviewer/editor reports several times on different days. When revising a paper for resubmission, write an initial response to the reviewers/editor before starting a rewrite or undertaking additional empirical work. Have a thick skin, a hard head and a short memory.