Research, strategy.

Welcome. Thanks for taking the time to check out this little resource page I created. My goal here is to provide some helpful information for young scholars in the fields of organization theory, strategy, and management about the tools and techniques to help them write their research papers. I do not want to tell you what to research or what kind of research is better or worse but to provide some guidance on how to structure your research system to be effective at achieving your own research goals either as a Ph.D. student or as a new faculty member.

I write this resource page based on my own experience. Over the last 15 years, I’ve struggled to publish my work. During this learning process, I received excellent advice from senior colleagues, peers, and anonymous reviewers about improving my work. Some of the advice was specific to the paper I was writing; other advice became the models and systems I used to conduct all my research moving forward. I also learned through trial and error about how to significantly reduce the cost and headache of doing specific research tasks. This includes mundane things like setting up a directory for a new project or conducting a literature review for a topic that I want to learn about for a new paper I am writing.

I began this project by writing down a model of my research system and then broke down the more significant components of the system into smaller research tasks that fall within these larger chunks. The major components of my research system constitute the primary topics that make up the chapters of this guide. Within each chapter, I break down this process into micro chunks: minute tasks of the research process, such as setting up a project directory, commenting code, comparing job offers, etc. If you find this guide helpful, you may skip from chapter to chapter and task to task. As a result, I have created hyperlinks that connect related chapters and tasks, even if they may not be proximate in the numerical sequence of the guide.

[note: This page is UNDER CONSTRUCTION and will evolve over the next few months as I build out the guide. Also, the views expressed are my own and not of any institution with which I am affiliated.]

Below is a list of all the topics I will cover in this guide. As I finish writing a section, I will link the topic to the page.

PREFACE
1 Readme first
2 Zipfs law applied to research
CHAPTER 1: GETTING INTO AND OUT OF A PHD PROGRAM
3 Applying to PhD Programs in Strategy and Management
4 Finishing your Ph.D. (written, March 4, 2010)
CHAPTER 2: THE RESEARCH SYSTEM
5 Create your research system
6 Setting up your project directory
CHAPTER 3: WRITING
7 Writing research in Overleaf
8 The structure of an academic paper
9 Making points
10 Sentence-by-sentence; create an outline
11 Editing your research
12 How a paper should look
13 Dictation
CHAPTER 4: DATA ANALYSIS
14 Research computing
15 Data analysis for strategy research
16 The Linear Regression
17 Causal inference
18 Writing research code (R)
19 Writing research code (STATA)
20 Publication quality tables
21 Publication quality figures
22 VRIN Data
23 Public datasets
24 Administrative Data / Trace Data
25 Survey Data
26 Experimental Data
27 Qualitative Data and Simulation Models
CHAPTER 5: RESEARCH IDEAS
28 What is a research idea?
29 Is my idea any good?
30 The NULL model and hypothesis.
31 G.A.S.; A paper can’t do everything.
32 Theory: I don’t think it means what you think it means.
33 Taste.
CHAPTER 6: LITERATURE REVIEWS
34 Summarizing a paper
35 Bibliographies in LaTeX; the canon.
36 Data-driven literature reviews
CHAPTER 7: HABITS
37 Excellence is the little things
38 Habits
39 1% better on 30 dimensions checklist
40 Delegating
41 Setting goals and managing time
CHAPTER 8: PUBLISHING
42 Research tracker
43 The publishing process
44 Choosing a journal
45 Submitting
46 Cover letters
47 Rejected papers
48 Revise and resubmit
49 Reviewing papers
CHAPTER 9: PRESENTING
50 Research presentations
51 Seminar Q&A
52 Short presentations
CHAPTER 10: YOUR CAREER
53 Job Market Paper
54 Curriculum Vitae
55 Research Pipeline
56 Research statement
57 Teaching statement
58 Personal research website
59 How academic hiring works
60 Getting a job
61 Comparing offers
62 The academic career
63 Getting tenure
64 Citations
65 Rockstars vs. musicians
CHAPTER 11: PERSONAL FINANCE
66 Choosing where to live: time vs. money
67 Personal finance for PhDs and Junior Faculty
CHAPTER 12: CREATING A COMMUNITY
68 Coauthoring
69 Sharing working papers
70 Conferences
71 Conference organizing
72 Academic social media
CHAPTER 13: TOPICS AND IDEAS IN STRATEGY/OT
73 Strategy / OT research dictionary
74 PhD Strategic Management (syllabus)
75 PhD Organizational Theory (syllabus)
76 PhD Field Experiments in Strategy (syllabus)
77 PhD Social Network Analysis (syllabus)
78 Ph.D. Entrepreneurship (syllabus)
CHAPTER 14: MBA STUDENTS
79 Teaching strategy to professional students
80 MBA course in Strategic Management
81 MBA course in Managing Social Networks