ECO 4810. Seminar in Economics

1
ECO 4810. Seminar in Economics

• Annotated Bibliography,
• Literature Review

2
Purpose

• Learn as much as you can from the efforts and
  work of others
• Prevents duplication or identifies replication
  needs
• Identifies the frontier of knowledge and the
  potential research contribution
• Provides ideas and directions

3
Conduct

• Literature search
• Active reading
• Annotated bibliography
• Literature review writing

4
Literature search

• Search for journal articles, book chapters or
  working papers
• No books takes too long to read
• No magazine articles too fluffy
• No web pages too bogus
• A good start (everything) Google Scholar
• (Mostly) Published papers EconLit, ScienceDirect
• Working papers RePEc, SSRN

5
Active reading

• Actually read the paper
• Dont skim, except for the highly technical parts
• Take notes while you read
• Draw graphs that you can use
• Write out equations that you can use

6
Annotated bibliography

• Use your notes, etc from active reading
• Include the
• Primary purpose of the paper
• A description of the data
• The form of empirical model estimated y f(x)
  what is y? what is x?
• Results what the researchers discovered

7
Literature review writing

• Do not summarize the papers in the literature
  review, this is the role of the annotated
  bibliography
• The literature review should analyze the papers
  (i.e., compare and contrast)
• Start at the beginning (the seminal paper) and
  end with what you hope to accomplish

8
Examples

• Every paper in your literature review has a short
  literature review
• Journals of long literature reviews Journal of
  Economic Literature, Journal of Economic Surveys

9
Format

• At least 5 legitimate references
• Annotated bibliography contains a one paragraph
  summary of each journal article/working paper (do
  not reproduce the abstract)
• The literature review should be between 1 and 2
  pages independent of the annotated bibliography
• Format 12 point Times New Roman font, 1 inch
  margins all around, double-spacing (no extra
  spaces between paragraphs or sections)

10
References

• References should be set out in alphabetical
  order of the first author's name in a list at the
  end of the paper.
• They should be given in some standard form
• Include the following information authors, title
  of paper, journal name, volume number, issue
  number, page numbers
• For exampleDasgupta, Partha and Stiglitz,
  Joseph, "Industrial structure and the nature of
  innovative activity," Economic Journal 90
  266-293, 1980.