Transcription of Writing the Empirical Journal Article - Yale University
1 Writing the Empirical Journal ArticleDaryl J. BemCornell UniversityPlanning Your Article Should You Write? 2 Analyzing Data 2 Reporting the Findings 2 How Should You Write? 3 For Whom Should You Write? 3 Writing Your Article4 The Shape of An Article 4 The Introduction 4 The Opening Statements 4 Examples of Examples 5 The Literature Review 5 Citations 6 Criticizing Previous Work 6 Ending the Introduction 6 The Method Section 6 The Results Section 7 Setting the Stage 7 Presenting the Findings 8 Figures and Tables 9On Statistics 9 The Discussion Section 9 The Title and Abstract 10 Rewriting and Polishing Your Article11 Some Matters of Style12 Omit Needless Words 12 Avoid Metacomments on the Writing 13 Use Repetition and Parallel Construction 13 Jargon 14 Voice and Self-Reference
2 14 Tense 14 Avoid Language Bias 14 Research Participants 14 Sex and Gender 14 Racial and Ethnic Identity 15 Sexual Orientation 15 Disabilities 16 Common Errors of Grammar and Usage 16 Compared with versus Compared to 16 Data 16 Different from versus Different than 16 Since versus Because 16 That versus Which 16 While versus Although, But, Whereas 16 Publishing Your Article16 References17 A version of this Article appears in Darley, J. M., Zanna, M. P., & Roediger III, H. L. (Eds) (2003). The Compleat Academic:A Practical Guide for the Beginning Social Scientist, 2nd Edition.
3 Washington, DC: American Psychological the Empirical Journal Article2 You have conducted a study and analyzed the it is time to write. To publish. To tell the world whatyou have learned. The purpose of this Article is to enhancethe chances that some Journal editor will let you do you are new to this enterprise, you may find ithelpful to consult two additional sources of detailed information on the proper format of a journalarticle, see the Publication Manual of the American Psy-chological Association (APA, 2001) and recent articles inthe Journal to which you plan to submit your renewing your acquaintance with the formal and sty-listic elements of English prose, you can read Chapter 2of the Publication Manual or any one of several stylemanuals.
4 I recommend The Elements of Style by Strunkand White (2000). It is brief, witty, and I write, review, and edit primarily for jour-nals in personality and social psychology, I have drawnmost of my examples from those areas. Colleagues assureme, however, that the guidelines set forth here are alsopertinent for articles in experimental psychology and bi-opsychology. Similarly, this Article focuses on the reportof an Empirical study, but the general Writing suggestionsapply as well to the theoretical articles, literature reviews,and methodological contributions that also appear in ourjournals. (Specific guidance for preparing a literature re-view Article for Psychological Bulletin can be found inBem, 1995.)
5 Planning Your ArticleWhich Article Should You Write?There are two possible articles you can write: (a) thearticle you planned to write when you designed yourstudy or (b) the Article that makes the most sense now thatyou have seen the results. They are rarely the same, andthe correct answer is (b).The conventional view of the research process is thatwe first derive a set of hypotheses from a theory, designand conduct a study to test these hypotheses, analyze thedata to see if they were confirmed or disconfirmed, andthen chronicle this sequence of events in the Journal arti-cle. If this is how our enterprise actually proceeded, wecould write most of the Article before we collected thedata.
6 We could write the introduction and method sectionscompletely, prepare the results section in skeleton form,leaving spaces to be filled in by the specific numericalresults, and have two possible discussion sections ready togo, one for positive results, the other for negative this is not how our enterprise actually is more exciting than that, and the best jour-nal articles are informed by the actual Empirical findingsfrom the opening sentence. Before Writing your Article ,then, you need to Analyze Your Data. Herewith, a ser-monette on the Data. Once upon a time, psychologists ob-served behavior directly, often for sustained periods oftime. No longer. Now, the higher the investigator goes upthe tenure ladder, the more remote he or she typicallybecomes from the grounding observations of our you are already a successful research psychologist, thenyou probably haven t seen a participant for some graduate assistant assigns the running of a study to abright undergraduate who writes the computer programthat collects the data automatically.
7 And like the moderndentist, the modern psychologist rarely even sees the datauntil they have been cleaned by human or computer compensate for this remoteness from our partici-pants, let us at least become intimately familiar with therecord of their behavior: the data. Examine them fromevery angle. Analyze the sexes separately. Make up newcomposite indexes. If a datum suggests a new hypothesis,try to find additional evidence for it elsewhere in the you see dim traces of interesting patterns, try to reor-ganize the data to bring them into bolder relief. If thereare participants you don t like, or trials, observers, or in-terviewers who gave you anomalous results, drop them(temporarily).
8 Go on a fishing expedition for some-thing anything , this is not immoral. The rules of scientific andstatistical inference that we overlearn in graduate schoolapply to the Context of Justification. They tell us whatwe can conclude in the articles we write for public con-sumption, and they give our readers criteria for decidingwhether or not to believe us. But in the Context of Dis-covery, there are no formal rules, only heuristics orstrategies. How does one discover a new phenomenon?Smell a good idea? Have a brilliant insight into behavior?Create a new theory? In the confining context of an em-pirical study, there is only one strategy for discovery:exploring the , there is a danger.
9 Spurious findings can emergeby chance, and we need to be cautious about anything wediscover in this way. In limited cases, there are statisticaltechniques that correct for this danger. But there are nostatistical correctives for overlooking an important dis-covery because we were insufficiently attentive to thedata. Let us err on the side of the Findings. When you are through ex-ploring, you may conclude that the data are not strongenough to justify your new insights formally, but at leastyou are now ready to design the right study. If you stillplan to report the current data, you may wish to mentionthe new insights tentatively, stating honestly that theyremain to be tested adequately.
10 Alternatively, the datamay be strong enough to justify recentering your articlearound the new findings and subordinating or even ig-noring your original is not advice to suppress negative results. If yourstudy was genuinely designed to test hypotheses that de-rive from a formal theory or are of wide general interestfor some other reason, then they should remain the focusof your Article . The integrity of the scientific enterpriserequires the reporting of disconfirming the Empirical Journal Article3 But this requirement assumes that somebody outthere cares about the hypotheses. Many respectable stud-ies are explicitly exploratory or are launched from specu-lations of the I-wonder-if.
