Publishing Your First Quantitative Paper
A Practical Guide to Writing, Analyzing, and Presenting Social Science Research
1 Details
Instructor: Bogdan G. Popescu
Prerequisites: None
2 Course Description
This course is an intensive, hands-on introduction to writing a research article in the social sciences, with a focus on political science, sociology, or economics. Students will be taught to use R, R Studio, Quarto, Markdown, and Jabref.
By the end of the course, students will have developed and refined a complete research paper through a series of iterative assignments and structured feedback. The course integrates methodological training, substantive readings, and practical writing skills. Course content is divided into weekly units covering both technical skills and theoretical content.
This is the visual roadmap of the course:
Topic → Proposal → Methods → Analysis → Paper Draft → Feedback → Final Paper → Website
3 Learning Outcomes
Upon successful completion of this course the students will be able to:
- Develop a research question and transform it into a publishable paper.
- Master essential academic tools including reference managers (e.g., JabRef), markdown-based word processing, and professional presentation software.
- Understand and apply core methods in social science research, including qualitative comparative analysis, difference-in-differences (DiD), and regression discontinuity design (RDD).
- Write each section of a paper: abstract, introduction, argument, methods, literature review, findings, discussion, and conclusion.
- Conduct basic quantitative analysis in R, including data merging, regression modeling, and visualization.
- Create a personal academic website using GitHub Pages to showcase their work.
4 Example Paper
The research paper should provide an extensive background on the topic and a clear contribution to the literature. The analysis should include some quantitative analysis to test hypotheses. The statistical part of the research project involves using data (collect and prepare the data to run quantitative analyses and produce graphs) and a specialized software (R). You can download the template for the paper at this link. You are welcome to tweak the template in any way you like. Check out lecture 2 to understand the paper structure better.
5 Example Paper Presentation
You can download the template for the paper presentation at this link. This should provide a good starting point for the type of information that needs to be included in the presentation. You are welcome to tweak the template in any way you like. Check out lecture 4 to understand the presentation structure better.
6 Recommended Optional Books
Writing Academic Articles
Coppedge, M. 2012. Democratization and Research Methods. Cambridge University Press.
Halperin, S., & Heath, O. (2012). Political Research: Methods and Practical Skills (3rd ed.). Oxford University Press.
Punch, K. F. 2014. Introduction to social research: Quantitative and qualitative approaches (3rd ed.). SAGE Publications.
Van Evera, S. 1997. Guide to methods for students of political science. Cornell University Press.
Statistics
Cunningham, Scott.2021. Causal Inference: The Mixtape. Yale University Press.https://mixtape.scunning.com.
Ismay, Chester, and Albert Y. Kim. 2019. Statistical Inference via Data Science: A ModernDive into R and the Tidyverse. Chapman and Hall / CRC. https://moderndive.com/.
Huntington-Klein, Nick. 2021. The Effect: An Introduction to Research Design and Causality. Boca Raton, Florida: Chapman and Hall / CRC. https://theeffectbook.net/.
Llaudet, Elena and Imai, Kosuke. 2023 “Data Analysis for Social Science.” Princeton: Oxford University Press.
Warne, Russel T. 2018. “Statistics for the Social Sciences. A General Linear Model Approach.” London: Cambridge University Press.
Causal Inference
Bauer, Paul C. and Dennis Cohen. 2023. Applied Causal Analysis (with R) https://bookdown.org/paul/applied-causal-analysis/.
Keyes, David, R for the Rest of Us: 2025. A Statistics-Free Introduction https://book.rfortherestofus.com. No Stach Press
Geographic Information Systems (GIS)
Lovelace, Robin, Nowosad, Jakub, and Jannes Muenchow. 2021. Geocomputation with R. https://bookdown.org/robinlovelace/geocompr/.
Mieno, Tara. 2023. R as GIS for Economists. https://tmieno2.github.io/R-as-GIS-for-Economists/.
Lecture 1
The Topic and Research Question Slides
- Topic vs. Research Question
- How to find a Topic and a Research Question
- Good and Bad Research Questions
Lecture 2
Essential Tools for Writing a Paper Slides
- Jabref
- Quarto
- Article Template
Lecture 3
Operations and Objects in R Slides
- Quarto Notebooks
- Operations and Objects in R
Lecture 4
- Presentations in Quarto
- Presentation themes in Quarto
- Image and Video Backgrounds
- Code Blocks
Lecture 5
- Variables
- Samples and Population
- Data
Lecture 6
- Dataframes
- Lists
- External Files
- Paths
Lecture 7
Dplyr and Basic Visualization Slides
- Merging Data
- Scatterplots
Lecture 8
Visualizing Data Distributions in R Slides
- Histograms
- Barplots
- Lineplots
Lecture 9
Modeling Relationships Between Variables Slides
- Correlations
- Bivariate Regressions
Lecture 10
Interpreting Binary and Multivariate Regression Models Slides
- Dummy Variables
- Interactions
- Multivariate Regressions
Lecture 11
Differences in Differences Slides
- Differences in Differences
- Exploring Binary Variables
- Interaction Effects
Lecture 12
Regression Discontinuity Design Slides
- Identifying Local Effects Using Arbitrary Thresholds
- Regression Discontinuity Designs and Causal Effects
Lecture 13
- Color contrasts
- Principles of
ggplot
- Aesthetics and geoms
- Labels and Facets
Lecture 14
- Barplots
- Uncertainty
- Boxplots and Violin Plots
- Annotations
- Temporal Plots
Lecture 15
The Abstract and the Argument Slides
- Writing the Abstract and the Argument
- Types of Abstracts
- Conceptual Definitions
- Hypotheses
- Dependent and Independent Variables
Lecture 16
- Writing the Literature Review
- Sources
- Types of Literature Reviews
Lecture 17
- Research Designs
- Quantitative vs. Qualitative Research Designs
- Types of Research Designs
Lecture 18
Findings, Discussion, Intro, and Conclusion Slides
- Structuring and presenting your findings
- Crafting a strong discussion section
- Finalizing your paper
Lecture 19
Making a website on GitHub: username.github.io
- Making a website on Quarto
- Storing a website on GitHub
- Structuring a professional website for Data Analytics Jobs