20 Pointers for Conducting
and Publishing Research
Lawrence D. Brown
Presentation at Temple University
March 12, 2015

Identify your most productive time of day and
conduct your research during this time. Devote
some time to your research every day.

Love the research you are doing when you first
get started on it. You will love it less as your
work on it progresses. Be careful not to turn
your attention away from this project onto the
next new research idea.

Be sure to answer the three Kinney (1986 The
Accounting Review) questions early on in your
paper:
“What is the problem,”
“Why is it important,” and
“How will it be solved?”

Select topics of interest to the target journal.
Papers are more suitable to some journals
than others. You should reference papers
published in the journal to which you are
submitting.

Make it clear why your work is important to
your target audience. Don’t just say your
study is interesting or important. It must
make a significant incremental contribution
to be published in a premier journal.

Seek comments of experts in your field
before submitting for possible publication.
One excellent way to do this is to present it
at workshops, both your own school’s and
those of nearby schools. See Brown
(January 2005 The Accounting Review).

Determine your comparative advantage, play
to your strength and address your weaknesses
by improving skills or getting co-authors with
skills you lack or prefer not to cultivate.

When working with co-authors, carefully lay
out each co-author’s responsibilities.

Set deadlines, both when conducting initial
research and revising papers.

Go to research meetings and conferences to
network and obtain research ideas.

Be persistent, but do not be foolish. Know
when to submit a research paper, and when
to abandon a project.

Form is important: check references, tables,
grammar. Write in a scientific manner.

Beware of ‘hot topics’ but your research
needs to be timely and relevant.

Write your abstract, introduction and
conclusions sections last. Or write a quick
draft of the introduction and move on to the
rest of the paper.

Be focused and write your paper simply.
You should strive to write in such a way that
most readers agree on the main points of
your paper.

Know how to respond to reviewers and
editors. Do what you can to satisfy their
concerns. Don’t argue with reviewers/editor
and don’t do ‘new things’ they did not ask.

Do not adopt the ‘24 hour rule,’ sending a
paper to another journal a day after it is
rejected. Carefully consider the reviewers’
and editor’s comments before submitting your
paper to a different journal. Reviewers make
at least some valuable comments. There is
also a non-trivial chance that you encounter
the same reviewer at the ‘next’ journal.

Do not write much of your paper before
obtaining some results. Similarly, do not
obtain lots of results before starting to write
your paper. Writing the paper will help you
determine what additional results to procure.
Obtaining results will help you determine
how to write the paper.

Do not begin revising your paper until you
have read the reviewer/editor reports several
times on different days. When revising a paper
for resubmission, write an initial response to
the reviewers/editor before starting a rewrite
or undertaking additional empirical work.

Have a thick skin, a hard head and a short
memory.