書名：The Economist's Craft ：An Introduction to Research, Publishing, and Professional Development?

Introduction—How Academic Research Gets Done

• In some ways, it is certainly depressing:an academic research career is becoming a more and more difficult way to earn a living. However, academia remains a wonderful profession in which you can have a fantastic life. Scholars can contribute to society in any number of ways—educating good students, increasing humanity’s body of knowledge, providing insights that can improve public policy. Tenure enables us to present unpopular ideas without worrying about retribution from bosses. Our friends in the private sector are often jealous of our academic freedom to express such unpopular opinions publicly.

• So why do you do academic research?9 Why embark on this path in life? There is only one really good answer to this question: because you love it. You love playing with new ideas, understanding things you didn’t understand before, learning something new about the world, but also communicating that to other people, teaching them the new idea, shepherding new ideas to their place in the world We all would love to solve a famous problem that was formulated by someone else, especially one that many others have unsuccessfully attempted to solve.

• Only people who love academic scholarship—who love playing with ideas and who love the hard process of refining them, writing them,presenting them, and interacting with others about them—actually produce good work.

• Most of the time, at least half of the battle is coming up with the right questions to ask and the right way to ask them.

• In most fields, it is very rare for someone working alone in secret to come up with an important discovery.

• Frequently the most important question in an academic seminar,and the one for which the author most often does not have a good answer, is “Why do we care about this paper?”

• A paper that fails to explain why its contribution is important will have trouble getting published, and even if it does get published, it will have little impact.

• Traditional classes in graduate programs teach students to solve problems that have been posed for them, which is what they have to do to pass their qualifying exams.

• In particular, they do not teach students how to pick research projects that will have lasting impact, how to communicate why a project will be important, how to handle data properly, how to write up results in an appropriately scientific yet readable manner, and how to interpret results in a way that others will find reasonable.

• Some scholars are fortunate enough to have someone to teach them the craft of the profession, while others go their entire career without figuring it out.

• Third, the growth in the number of top-level journals has not matched that of research-active faculty, so it has become increasingly difficult to publish a paper in a “top-tier” journal.

• Similar changes have occurred in economics departments and also in related fields such as accounting.

• Occasionally, there is a seminal event, research breakthrough, or technological innovation that spurs new research.

• I fear that finance is heading in the direction of many other fields that find themselves populated by scholars in the same department who cannot understand each other’s work

• Helping young academics survive the pressure they face and put their best foot forward when doing research is the overarching theme of this book. Here are a few principles that I will touch on throughout the book that are likely to help young scholars develop a successful research portfolio.(understand your production function、proceed with a plan、finish projects、be professional in your interpersonal relationships)

• Nonetheless, having a business plan is important, principally because it forces the entrepreneur to keep his focus on the end goal and requires him to have a very good reason to depart from the original plan.

• Your ultimate output might not look like the plan you made, but having such a plan is likely to make you happier with the output you do produce.

• Once I defined my areas of research more tightly and focused on becoming one of the main participants in these areas, I became a much more productive scholar.

• Sometimes authors refuse to publish a paper if they cannot get it accepted in one of the journals considered top-tier. I believe this attitude is a mistake. There are many journals, and a paper will have a much larger impact if it is published in a good journal, even one that is not considered top-tier, than if it is not published at all. Many good papers are never published because the authors lack the persistence to see it through, or because they do not understand the paper’s contribution and limitations and try to market the paper in an inappropriate manner.

• If we produce a result and post it publicly, we have to make sure it is correct, double-and triple-checking the code before posting.

• Everyone makes honest mistakes, but if we make too many mistakes, even honest ones, people will stop believing anything we do.