A.3. Writing Up Your Work for Other Scholars

When you are writing up an empirical study for other scholars, you generally will want to follow a journal article format. Reading prior literature in your area of interest is an excellent way to learn the core components of a journal article and how to write one yourself. There are also many excellent resources to help guide you as you prepare to write a journal article (Becker 2020; Johnson et al. 2010; Moskovitz and Smith-Lovin 2017; White 2005).

Journals differ in the particular format they use, and authors have some latitude in organizing the article the way they want. That said, it’s a good idea to follow the sequencing and section headings below so that other sociologists can easily understand your study:

1. Abstract
2. Introduction (note that published papers don’t usually include this header; they just dive right into the text of the paper after the abstract).
3. Literature Review (journals don’t typically include this header, either, but instead have sections with headings describing distinct themes or topics in the literature)
4. Statement of the Problem or Problem Statement (this may be incorporated into the end of the Literature Review)
5. Hypotheses (this also may be integrated into the end of the Literature Review, or just implied from context)
6. Methods (often spread across separate sections like Data, Data Collection, Sample, Case Selection, Measures, and Data Analysis)
7. Results or Findings (journal articles often won’t include this header, but will have separate sections devoted to each of the study’s main findings)
8. Discussion and/or Conclusion (sometimes called Implications and sometimes merged into a single section called Discussion and Conclusion)
9. Acknowledgments (sometimes a footnote on the first page of an article)
10. Declaration of Conflicts of Interest (sometimes excluded)
11. References or Works Cited

As you can see, the sections of a journal article are roughly the same as those for research talk described above, but you have more space to flesh out the details, and the names of the sections will differ slightly (for instance, the slide Theoretical Contributions will correspond to the Discussion or Conclusion sections of a written paper). Let’s review each of these sections and what goes in them.

Nearly all empirical articles will have an abstract, the paragraph at the beginning of an article that summarizes the author’s research question, methods used to answer the question, and key findings. Abstracts may also give you some idea about the theoretical perspective of the authors and the research problems they’re attempting to address. The standard length depends on the journal, but most abstracts range between 100 and 200 words. Some journals further break down the abstract into short summaries of each section of the article. The abstract may also be followed by a list of keywords—terms that the article authors themselves usually select to describe the main concepts and topics they are covering.

Again, the introduction does not need to be explicitly titled as such, but you will want at least one or two introductory paragraphs to start off your paper. Here, you want to quickly make a case for why your research is important and necessary. You might begin with general background on your topic, such as key statistics, a summary of recent trends, or historical context. You then want to quickly summarize your research problem and the research question that arises from it. (This summary may paraphrase or entirely replicate portions of your abstract, which is okay in academic papers: you want to hammer home these key points throughout the manuscript.) For instance, you could briefly describe the existing literature (saving any extended discussion for the next section), identifying where exactly your own research question and research study fit and what gaps in scholarly understanding they fill.

The size and scope of the literature review varies greatly depending on the discipline and the journal. Sometimes an article’s literature review is published as one or more thematic sections, rather than being titled as a “literature review.” Sometimes the literature review is combined with the introduction; this is less common in sociology, but quite common in applied fields like medicine where there is less in the way of theory to discuss. (We describe the structure and contents of the literature review in depth in Chapter 5: Research Design.)

The statement of the problem (also called the “problem statement”) may be a separate section of the article, or it may just be the ending paragraph or two of the literature review. In this section, you want to provide a concise description of the research problem, the so-called gaps in the literature: what the current literature misses, what sort of puzzles still need to be solved, what theories could be applied to the social phenomenon of interest that would explain it better, how we could extend previous types of analysis into new areas, and so on. Here, you are taking the picture of the existing research you painted earlier in the paper and using it to make the case for the importance and necessity of your particular study.

Sometimes, researchers will follow up the literature review and problem statement with hypotheses. (This is more common for quantitative studies rather than qualitative ones.) Hypotheses are educated guesses as to the best answers to the research question, and they are explicitly derived from the literature review—in fact, they may be incorporated into the literature review, as in Figure 1 below. You can choose to list your hypotheses formally (for instance, numbering them and setting them off from the rest of your prose) or just describe them within the main text of your manuscript.

Figure 1. Inserting Formal Hypotheses into Your Paper

The methods (or methodology) section reviews how you gathered your sample, how you measured your variables, and how you analyzed the data. You may use separate “Sample,” “Case Selection,” “Data,” or “Data Collection” sections or subsections where you describe how you went about choosing or recruiting the people, organizations, or sites that you studied. As we mentioned in our discussion of research talks above, survey-based studies in particular will include a discussion of specific dependent and independent variables and how they are measured. This section (sometimes titled “Measures” or the like) will include the actual text of key survey questions, and it may also contain some descriptive results regarding respondents’ characteristics or their answers to general questions (answers that relate to the specific research question, however, will be described later in the article’s “Findings” or “Results”section). There should also be a separate “Data Analysis” section in which the authors describe which statistical or qualitative analytical procedures they used to process the data they collected, including the software they used and any coding strategy they adopted.

In general, you should use the methods section to describe and justify your choice of research techniques. Oftentimes, you will also want to bring up the limitations of your methodological approach here, though you may save some or all of this discussion for the limitations section at the paper’s end (see below).

The findings or results section provides an in-depth discussion of what the study found—whether its hypotheses turned out to be supported by the data, and what conclusions about the phenomenon of interest can be drawn from the available evidence. For quantitative studies, you will want to include tables, charts, maps, and other figures that convey the relevant patterns or trends in the data; the accompanying text should break down the key findings in those tables and figures in clear prose. For qualitative studies, you will want to provide in-depth quotes from respondents or detailed descriptions of the spaces or events you observed. (See the chapters of the textbook devoted to quantitative and qualitative methods for more specific advice about presenting your findings in written form.)

The discussion section (sometimes titled “Implications” or “Discussion and Conclusion”) reviews the main findings, addresses how those findings connect with the existing literature, and discusses their broader implications for research, theory, practice, or policy. Here, you will want to explicitly call back to the themes or authors in your literature review to make the case for how your work challenges or expands that previous scholarship. Sometimes the discussion section will end the main text of the article, and sometimes there will be a separate conclusion, with perhaps another summary of the article’s findings (you’ll notice how much repetition there is in empirical articles!) and perhaps an even higher-level discussion of the study’s big-picture implications.

Somewhere in the discussion or conclusion there will also be a discussion of limitations, which describes the weaknesses of the study’s methodological or theoretical approach. As we emphasized earlier, good researchers are always candid about how and where their research may fall short, and all sociological research has limitations, given the complexity of what we study. In this section, the authors may explicitly discuss the scope conditions of the research—under what conditions the research findings hold, and under what conditions they do not.

Immediately following the main text of the article there may be a declaration of conflicts of interest section and an acknowledgements section. As we discussed in Chapter 8: Ethics, scholars need to be upfront about any financial or other personal benefits they receive that relate to the topics they study, and having a separate declaration section encourages this transparency. In the acknowledgements section at the end (which is sometimes included as a footnote at the top of the article instead), you should personally thank anyone who read through drafts of your work or provided relevant advice. You should also thank any formal peer reviewers, even if they were anonymous (“We thank the three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments”). Importantly, the acknowledgements section should also indicate the sources of any funding that were used to complete the study, such as the names of grants and the institutions that provided them.

At the end of the article will be a list of references (also titled “Works Cited”). Reports written for scholarly consumption also include in-text citations throughout the report that correspond to those references (as we describe further below). Before or after the references, you may also include an appendix or multiple appendices where you include supplementary tables, figures, or other information that provides additional context or evidence of the rigor of the study’s analysis.

The sections we’ve just described are relevant to empirical journal articles. As we mentioned in Chapter 5: Research Design, other types of articles include theoretical and review articles, which tend to be organized into sections based on the themes, topics, or arguments they cover. Scholarly books have a looser structure as well, though those meant for academic audiences may roughly follow the sequence of a journal article—with one chapter devoted to the introduction, another to the literature review, another to the study’s methods, and so on.

If you already have a journal in mind that you want to submit to, it’s a good idea to look up their submission guidelines (just do a web search for that journal and look for the page on its site regarding submissions). The journal’s submissions guidelines should go over the format you need to use in writing up your manuscript, including any requirements in terms of maximum word count for your manuscript, the word limit for the abstract, the number of keywords to provide, and the citation style you should use for your references.

Citing Your Sources

Researchers use citations in order to disclose the sources of their facts and indicate that there is evidence from other people’s work that backs up the specific claims they are making. They also use citations when they mention ideas that aren’t their own. It is very important to acknowledge whenever you are borrowing other people’s ideas by properly and fully citing those authors in your paper. Otherwise, you may be guilty—even unwittingly—of plagiarism, the presentation of someone else’s work as your own.

Note that just including the source in your list of references is not enough here. You must include an in-text citation wherever you bring up the other person’s idea. And even if you cite the relevant authors, you can still be guilty of plagiarizing them if you used too much of their wording. (This is called mosaic plagiarism, and it can also get you in big trouble.) When you paraphrase someone’s writing, you need to do more than just change some words and reorder the phrases; you need to convey the ideas in your own words, and use quotation marks around any exact wording you did borrow. (Here’s some advice on the sorts of careful paraphrasing and quoting you need to do to avoid mosaic plagiarism.) You should also be aware that it’s possible to be guilty of self-plagiarism, reusing your past work without acknowledging that fact. This is quite common among students, who may not be aware that they need to get their instructors’ permission to adapt work done in one class for another class.

Plagiarism has damaged many careers—sometimes many years after the offending publication. Academics have been reprimanded, even when they footnoted the sources of the wording they used. Students have faced dire consequences just for copying a few sentence fragments. If you feel a little afraid and paranoid after reading this warning, consider it a good thing—and let it motivate you to take extra care to ensure that you are not plagiarizing the work of others.

Academic disciplines usually have a particular citation style that dictates the format and information included in in-text citations—how sources are identified within the text of the paper—as well as in the references listed at the end of the paper. Most social scientific journals, including many sociology journals, use the citations style endorsed by the American Psychological Association (“APA style”). Books (including academic books) often use “Chicago style,” described in the Chicago Manual of Style, the most popular version of which places citations in footnotes rather than in the main text. APA style is very concise, but it leaves out details like authors’ first names; Chicago style is elegant and inconspicuous, but it may annoy academics who don’t want to hunt through footnotes to find out which author is being cited.

The style endorsed by the American Sociological Association (ASA) is very similar to APA style but contains authors’ first names, and—in our humble opinion—it just looks better (APA should stand for “ampersands aplenty”). ASA style is used by many of the field’s top journals. Below we provide a brief overview. The Purdue University Online Writing Lab also has a helpful guide. For more detailed information, consult the most recent edition of the ASA Style Guide.

In ASA style, in-text citations must include the last names of any authors and the year of publication. See Table 1 below for examples on how to handle most citation situations. As noted there, a common error that many students make is including a parenthetical in-text citation with an author’s last name when that author has already been mentioned in the main text. In that case, you just need to include the year of publication within parentheses right after the author’s name (and feel free to use either the full name or just the last name when mentioning cited authors within the main text). Furthermore, you don’t have to repeat the same citation multiple times within the same paragraph if it’s reasonable to assume, based on context clues, that the information comes from the same source. You can use a single cite when it is first relevant or just at the end of the paragraph—whichever makes more sense.

Another point of style worth flagging is that when a source has more than three authors, ASA style and many other citation styles condense the in-text citation so that it just includes the first listed author’s last name and then the term “et al.” (“Et al.”—short for “et alia”—is a Latin term meaning “and others.”) You can use “et al.” for parenthetical citations, but in the main text, write out all the authors’ names, or use the first author’s name and “collaborators”—for instance, “Gabriela León-Pérez and her collaborators.”

Why does the first author get all the attention? Sometimes—but not always—the first author did more of the work (in terms of data collection, data analysis, or just thinking through the topic) than the other authors. To recognize that larger contribution, the authors might agree that a particular author might be listed as the “first author” even if their last name does not come first in the alphabetical listing. For example, if Gabriela and Victor have co authored an article, but Gabriela contributed more to the intellectual work, then the in-text citation would be “León-Pérez and Chen.” On the other hand, if (a) Gabriela and Victor contributed equally to the article, or (b) if Victor contributed more than Gabriela, then the in-text citation would be “Chen and León-Pérez.” When the last names are listed alphabetically, as in the latter example, would scenario (a) or scenario (b) apply? The only way of knowing that is if the authors indicated somewhere in their article (such as in the acknowledgements section) how much each scholar contributed to the study.

Table 1. In-Text Citations

The end of your paper should include a list of all of the sources that were cited in the text. Typically, you begin this list on a separate page headed with the word “References” or “Works Cited.” References should be listed in alphabetical order by the authors’ last name. Order multiple works by the same author by their publication year (earliest first). If the author is an organization, use the organization’s name in place of a last name. If there is no author, use the first word of the work’s title.

The first author’s name will always be inverted: list the last name, followed by a comma, followed by the first name (and any middle names or middle initials). In ASA style, the second and subsequent authors are listed with their names not inverted.

How each reference is formatted depends on the type of source. The references for books usually include the following elements:

1. The first and last names of the author(s) (make sure to spell out the first names; don’t use initials unless that’s the way the name is written in the source)
2. Year of publication
3. Title of the book (in italics)
4. Place of publication followed by a colon. For cities outside of the U.S., provide the country. For U.S. cities, provide the U.S. postal abbreviation for the state (except for well-known cities, e.g., New York)
5. Publisher’s name

Here is the format for a book (note the capitalization of titles and names):

Author 1 Last Name, Author 1 First Name, Author 2 (full first name and full last name, not inverted), and Author 3 (full first name and full last name, not inverted). Year of publication. Name of Publication. Publisher’s City, State (or City, Country): Publisher’s Name.

The references for journal articles should always include:

1. The first and last names of the author(s)
2. Year of publication
3. Title of the article (in quotation marks)
4. Name of the journal (in italics)
5. Volume and issue number (the latter in parentheses) followed by a colon
6. Page numbers (note that there is no space after the colon)

Here is the format for a journal article (note the capitalization of titles and names):

Author1 Last Name, Author 1 First Name, Author 2 (full first name and full last name, not inverted), and Author 3 (full first name and full last name, not inverted). Year of publication. “Title of Article.” Journal Name Volume(Issue):Page numbers.

The table below presents examples of how to format common source types in the “References” or “Works Cited” section at the end of the paper.

Table 2. References in the Works Cited Section