Fudan Doctoral Supervisor: Continuous writing is the "king", and thesis writing cannot passively wait for "inspiration"

In fact, there is no one-size-fits-all formula for the selection strategy and writing skills of academic papers, and each mature scholar will form an experience, experience and chapter with his own imprint, and then form his own research interest and writing style.

A good academic study, I think, should have some of the following elements:

The first is to ask a good question; secondly, there is a good method, which can be a qualitative method or a quantitative method, or it can be a mixed method; and finally there must be good data.

Of course, it is best to have a good writing, and good writing is also a very important aspect, which can not only express the problem and describe the phenomenon more brilliantly, but also enhance everyone's interest in reading.

First, the blue ocean strategy: choose the field of research

The research field is not the same as the topic selection, the topic selection is a research problem that we ask when we write a paper or a book, and before entering the topic selection stage, we must first choose a research field. Here we can borrow a term from business schools - "blue ocean strategy": if there are a large number of researchers in a certain field and the competition is very fierce, we call it the "Red Ocean"; if a field is relatively new, you are a pioneer, and there are few competitors, then we call it a "blue ocean". In general, the "blue ocean" has a higher input-output ratio than the "red sea", because there are relatively few researchers before, and the potential for us to dig deep may be greater, so we should not easily enter an overcrowded "Red Sea" research field as much as possible. On the one hand, the development time of the Red Sea is relatively long, and the probability of new discoveries and new theories is lower; on the other hand, we are not easy to stand out as latecomers.

Everyone knows that "blue ocean" is better, but the question is how to find "blue ocean"? When we feel that a field is very valuable for research, then when searching the literature, it is usually necessary to find that the field has been studied before, and if there is no competitor of the same kind in the Chinese world, then the same kind of competitor will often be found in the English world. If no one has studied it before it is found, it may be that the keywords used in the literature search are incorrect, or it may be that there is no research feasibility in the field for the time being. It is not easy to find the "blue ocean", do not lightly fill the gap in research at home and abroad.

"Red Sea" and "Blue Ocean" are relatively speaking, taking myself as an example, when I did my doctoral dissertation more than ten years ago, the problem of migrant workers was a red sea, economics, sociology, and political science were all being studied, and at that time the problem of children of migrant workers was still a blue ocean, and I was a scholar who entered this field relatively early and used social science methods to conduct research. Now, the problem of the children of migrant workers has almost become a "Red Sea". Of course, in addition to the "blue ocean", the "red sea" also has the value of development, and we can develop a certain area in the "red sea" into a field similar to the "blue ocean" through the strategy of subdivision. Once successful, Red Sea will have a greater impact because it has a larger readership and higher citation rates. In general, for young scholars, choosing the "blue ocean" is a better strategy.

Second, what is problem awareness

After selecting a research field, we need to further clarify our research problems and clarify our own problem awareness. So, what is problem awareness? The easiest way to test whether a scholar is problem-aware is to see if he can express his research question in terms of a "why": "Why is this so, not that?" The academic question is usually a "why" question, and existing theories have no way to answer such a question, so it can arouse our curiosity and constitute a punchle (intellectual game).

How do I find a problem? Researchers need to have a very important ability, that is, the ability to constantly switch between the concrete and the abstract, and to transform the commonplace phenomena in daily life into academic problems, to put it in layman's terms, "listen to the thunder in the silent place" Nerds use book knowledge to explain everything and live in the abstract world; ordinary people explain everything with everyday experience and live in the concrete world; and scholars must shuttle back and forth between abstraction and concreteness. In academic research, we should gradually cultivate this ability.

For example, Olson raises the question of "free riding" in The Logic of Collective Action, which is a matter of common sense that we can use a proverb to express: "One monk carries water to drink, two monks carry water to drink, and three monks have no water to drink." "We often have this experience in our lives. But what's behind this phenomenon? From one monk, two monks to three monks, what does this change mean? How do we conceptualize it?

In academic language, going from one to three is a matter of the size of the organization. This abstracts the phenomenon. The larger the organization, the more people tend to hitchhike, because individual contributions are difficult to be effectively identified by others, do more and do less.

The importance of problem awareness is self-evident. Liang Qichao said: "Being able to find problems is the starting point for doing learning; if everything is not a problem, then there is no learning to speak of." Einstein also believed that "asking a problem is more important and more difficult than solving a problem, because solving a problem may be only a mathematical or experimental skill, and asking new problems, new possibilities, and looking at old problems from new perspectives requires creative imagination and marks the real progress of science." Both Liang Qichao and Einstein believe that asking a problem is more difficult and more important than solving a problem. For if no one raises the question, one cannot realize that it exists; in this sense, asking or redefining the question is the most important creative activity. The person who makes the conjecture is often better known than the person who ultimately proves the conjecture.

What kind of questions are good questions from a social science perspective? Good topics are important at both the practical and theoretical levels. The practical importance lies in the fact that the phenomena you explain are significant and have lasting implications for human society, such as economic growth, the rise and fall of nations, the transformation of the political system, and social conflicts. Some important questions can even be said to be "eternal" questions, and we may not be able to find the ultimate answer, but it can maximize our interest and passion for knowledge; the theoretical importance lies in the fact that the causal relationships and causal mechanisms you proposed explain an important phenomenon more effectively than before. Theory must involve causation, but causation is not necessarily theory. Theory involves causality that is important at the abstract level.

We all hope to be able to select some of the more important issues, but the big issues are by no means big and inappropriate. Some people may have some misreading of max Weber's value neutrality, thinking that the object of our study and the problems of research should be completely neutral in value and emotion, and there should be no involvement of personal emotions, which is actually a wrong understanding.

Value neutrality simply means that we should not tailor facts to our personal subjective preferences, such as recognizing all the information that meets my presuppositions, ignoring and ignoring it if it does not conform. We should have a kind of reflection on our own value positions, and everyone will consciously or unconsciously bring their own value positions into the study, and these value positions may contain certain prejudices, but we do not exclude the involvement of personal emotions in the study. For example, if someone studies racial discrimination and studies the Holocaust, I believe that you will definitely have anger, and it is not normal to have no anger. We may be curious, fascinated, and angry about the subject, but emotions will not allow us to distort the facts, falsify the data, and will not affect our relatively comprehensive and objective judgment. In fact, without emotional involvement, it is difficult to insist on investing a lot of time and energy in an issue, and it is difficult to have creative discoveries and insights.

In fact, my doctoral dissertation was originally intended to be the process of implementing the rural family planning policy. But when I returned to Hunan in 2006 and 2007 to do research, I found that family planning is no longer an important issue, local governments no longer strictly implement this policy, and the conflict between farmers and grass-roots governments on fertility issues has been greatly reduced.

Later, I turned to the study of the children of migrant workers, and the reason for this change was that at the Spring Festival Gala in 2007, a poetry recitation called "Heart Words" conquered me in an instant. This program made me pay attention to such a group as the children of migrant workers for the first time. The children's voices lingered in my head for a long time, lingering. Three months later, I finally made up my mind to abandon the doctoral dissertation plan that had been executed for a year and re-select the topic to write about such a group of "urbanized children". Behind this choice is actually my values and emotions at work, because I was once a child from the countryside, and I used to borrow from a middle school in the county, and I empathize with their experience.

With "big questions", there must also be "small answers", and small answers should be specific and reliable enough. "Small answers" mean that we should not pursue everything, do not think about solving and ending a problem one hundred percent, a good research can continue to stimulate follow-up research, and let the problem be advanced in the debate. A major problem often requires us to break it down into pieces and break it down into multiple-step processes. For example, X causes Y to be a good theory, and there should be a longer distance between X and Y, because if the distance between them is too short, they are likely to be the same thing. A relatively long causal chain needs to be broken down into several steps and intermediate processes.

Third, how to ask a good question

The types of questions in the paper can be roughly divided into research questions, practical issues, and policy issues. Research questions are often expressed in the sentence "why" and often appear as paradoxes—the need for a theory to make the paradoxes reasonable. For example, since man is rational, why not choose to hitchhike and be willing to join the revolution? A person risks his life to join the revolution, I alone bear one hundred percent of the cost, but the beneficiaries may be in tens of thousands, hundreds of millions, and my gains may be one in ten thousand, one in a hundred million, why does such an obviously irrational behavior in the economic sense occur.

Real-world problems are generally expressed in the form of "what is", often manifested as dilemmas — the need for a factual statement that includes value judgments. For example, the peasants are really miserable, the countryside is really poor, and agriculture is really dangerous. This statement of fact actually has a strong value judgment component, and "suffering", "poverty", and "danger" are not absolute concepts, but relative, comparative, and constructive concepts. For example, we often use a word called "hollowing out" now, and when we study urbanization, we talk about the hollowing out of rural China, which is a statement that contains value judgments. It describes the decline in the rural population as a crisis, and you see cities becoming more and more like Europe, and rural areas becoming more and more like Africa. Rural talents are being lost, and resources are constantly being extracted, resulting in rural decay. From another perspective, another value, the decline in the population of rural areas is not hollowing out, but urbanization, urbanization is the migration of rural population to the city, the population of the agricultural sector to the industrial sector, the service sector migration, this is a positive phenomenon. The small rural population does not mean that the rural population is withered, and the rural population in Europe and the United States is also very small, but the per capita income in the countryside is almost the same as that in the city.

Policy issues are often expressed in terms of "what to do", often as policy – the need for a concrete solution. For example, in the case of the rig of the nimby movement, how to solve the problem of location of nimby-avoidance public facilities? In what ways can garbage sorting policies be implemented to improve residents' support and compliance rates?

Before writing an article, it is necessary to consider clearly whether to solve a research problem, a practical problem or a policy problem, and accurately position the paper to write a good paper. How to ask good research questions, I think there are basically three ways:

First, through the observation of social facts, interesting and important political facts are discovered, and then the reasons behind them are found. For example, why is it that europe is a high welfare state in the same capitalist system, while the welfare level in the United States is relatively low? Why is it that the south and north of Italy have the same political system, but the performance of democracy is very different? Why are many developing countries often associated with periods of rapid economic growth associated with more social unrest than in previous periods of poverty? We should not only pay attention to major national events, such as in-depth media reports, which provide a lot of clues for the further research of our scholars; at the same time, we must also pay attention to the inconspicuous small things around us, such as urban renewal that has led to the disappearance of many small businesses in the community, which will have an impact on the social capital and neighborhood relations of urban communities.

Second, look for inconsistencies between theories and social facts. When there is a discrepancy between the two, look for new explanations. We must repeatedly travel between the theoretical literature and the empirical world, and find that theory and facts are contrary. For example, some new institutional economics scholars believe that as long as prices are clear, there will be a well-functioning market, which is not necessarily the case, so what is the reason behind this? As another example, Olson's theory of collective action holds that in the absence of selective incentives, people are less likely to participate in collective action;

Third, theoretical dialogue. In the face of different theoretical schools, whether it is possible to establish a new theoretical paradigm that reconciles these seemingly conflicting theories is also a way to discover problems. We can read the literature, sort out existing research, find the weaknesses of existing theories, find our own academic positions in theoretical debates, or integrate originally opposing or unrelated theoretical paradigms, such as institutionalism/rational choice orientation and cultural research orientation, structuralism and constructivism, conflict paradigm and harmonious paradigm, pluralism and elitism, modernization theory and attachment theory, can these seemingly tit-for-tat theoretical traditions reconcile or even integrate into a new theoretical paradigm? It should be emphasized that when doing social science research in China, I think it is necessary to take into account both positions.

The first position I call "in China." The so-called "in China", in English, is social science in China, refers to "in China" to do social science research, there is no Social Science with American/Chinese characteristics, the United States/China is just a field (all countries are the same), the empirical phenomenon of the United States/China is dominated by universal laws as the rest of the world, so researchers must analyze empirical materials and data, through the interaction between theory and facts, and the dialogue between Chinese and Western experiences. Discover general principles and theories of universal significance. We must not regard China as too special, but must observe and think about China from a comparative perspective.

The second position is "for China", which is expressed in English as social science for national interest, social science must pay attention to the well-being of society and the fate of mankind, as Chinese social scientists, there is also an obligation to make their own contributions to China's social development and prosperity. Tang Shiping believes that the fundamental task of the social sciences is to improve human welfare by providing knowledge to solve social problems. In this sense, the social sciences are not about "playing with academia," but about solving fundamental problems.

Fourth, the imagination and theoretical focus of social sciences

When we write, we must think about "Who cares" – why should others care about what I write? Why would someone who has nothing to do with my research subject want to read this article and want to read this book? There must be in my discourse those social facts that he is concerned with, and there are causal relations that he cares about.

"So what" – Maybe you tell an interesting story, but what does this story really mean on a theoretical level? This requires make sense, constructing meaning for our research.

Whether it is the exploration of problems or the construction of meaning, it is necessary to use the imagination of social science. This kind of imagination is not whimsical, but based on our existing theories, based on our previous knowledge precipitation. The questions we ask should have the significance of increasing knowledge and can refresh the cognition of the academic community.

How to cultivate this imagination, creativity? All we can do is the training of research methods, the accumulation of theories, reading and imitation, but none of them are imaginations themselves. I believe that part of the imagination comes from talent, such as Einstein's talent; but a considerable part of it comes from training, through the training of research methods, through the reading and comprehension of existing knowledge, we can enhance our imagination. Each discipline looks at a thing with its own unique perspective, which can be partially achieved through training.

In fact, the most basic ability of a scholar is the ability of a craftsman, and a scholar is an academic craftsman. The man we call the Master, whose treatises are as delicate as works of art, a talent that relies heavily on talent rather than training. For the average scholar, it is good to be able to make "crafts", and beginners who are just getting started even if they make a "daily necessities" are worthy of recognition. Academic training can only ensure that we make qualified products above the level of "daily necessities", and does not guarantee that we will be able to produce a "work of art".

So how do you cultivate the imagination of the social sciences during training? My personal advice is:

First, we must read books with reservations and criticism, and we must not be superstitious about any classics. All works have loopholes, either on the factual level, or on the logical level, and it is even possible that the way questions are asked is already wrong.

Second, we need to pay attention to major events and the things around us. The ability to observe is very important, and a person who is sensitive to theory should be sensitive enough to life. If you're blind to all sorts of things, very sluggish, it's unlikely that you'll do a very good job. The starting point for discovering problems is observation.

Third, think more and be good at association. The intensity of reading should not be too large, and there should be a certain amount of time for thinking. If reading doesn't spark your thinking, either it's not a good book or a good article, or you don't understand it at all.

Fourth, it is necessary to establish academic archives. Scholars should develop a good habit of storing different documents in a computer, and if they have any ideas and inspirations, they must also record them.

Fifth, writing, writing, writing is the "king's way"

Everyone who does research suffers a bit, and if they don't, it's unlikely to form so-called techniques. Technique is essentially an adaptation and evolution, like the survival skill we form after we fall over the heel. Textbooks can't teach such research experience, and I can't teach you directly, so you can only master it yourself in research. If you don't go into the water, you can never learn to swim, and doing research is not a theoretical problem, but a practical problem.

Why is it important to write continuously?

First, if you don't write, you feel like all the ideas in your head are perfect. If all ideas are only in the brain and do not form words, unless you have unparalleled logical thinking ability, it is difficult to find its loopholes. No one can write an impeccable paper in one go, and we need to improve our understanding of ourselves through writing.

Second, we can promote others' understanding of the issue through writing. If you don't write it, others can't really understand the problem or understand your ideas, so writing is crucial.

In the process of writing, there need to be two consciousnesses, one is the awareness of the problems we emphasized earlier. Problem awareness is not necessarily clear at the beginning of research or writing, it is a process of gradual focus. Especially for qualitative research, our research questions may not be packaged until the end of the study. Don't think that the order of the components of the paper is the same as the order in which we write. Our abstracts and introductions are often written last, first in the empirical section, then in the literature review, then in the concluding section, and finally in the introduction. Why write the introduction at the end, because the introduction presents all the "selling points" of the paper, and until the final stage, we often do not know where the "selling point" or highlights of the paper are.

Speaking of "selling points", it involves the second consciousness we want to emphasize, market awareness: Who is your reader? Why should they read your paper? Why should they (anonymous reviewers) support your paper to be published in a journal? Why are they (peers) citing your research? The papers we write Chinese are different from those in English, not only the translation of language, but more importantly, the concerns of Chinese and English academics are different, the theories of dialogue or cited literature are not the same, and the descriptions of phenomena are different. For example, Chinese school for the children of migrant workers in the context, without any explanation, Chinese can understand immediately. But if you translate it as a private migrant school, it will be difficult for foreign readers to understand, because they will feel that private schools are very good, much better than public schools, and you must further explain that this type is specially recruited for the children of migrant workers and lacks legal school qualifications.

Different disciplines are different, your paper is submitted to political science, economics journals, or sociological journals, the writing is certainly different, and the theories used will be different. Academics, the general public, or government officials are also different, and their concerns are different. Academia has a stronger theoretical preference, what role does this story have in promoting theoretical development? The public may have a curious mentality, is this story fascinating? Officials are more concerned about the policy issue behind the story, whether this issue is important or not, whether it needs to be solved urgently. But everyone likes interesting, interesting texts, and no one likes to read boring things.

Writing needs inspiration. How does inspiration come about? Inspiration is unattainable, cannot be easily obtained, and requires a long period of accumulation and exploration on a certain problem. The moments and places that generate inspiration have a very strong contingency, maybe on the high-speed train, maybe on the plane, maybe in sleep. Zhang Yitang, a Chinese mathematician who proves the twin prime conjecture, went to see the rehearsal of a friend's concert one day, and 20 minutes before departure, he went for a walk in the backyard of a friend's house, and there were often fawns in the backyard, and he wanted to see if the deer would come. He sat under the tree, not waiting for the deer, but waiting for a glimmer of epiphany, as if in that instant he felt himself straddling the strand of hair that stood in the way of the twin prime. In the months after I went back, the sensational "Bounded Distance Between Prime Numbers" came out.

Zhang Yitang did not wait for the fawn, but waited for the inspiration. In this sense, inspiration has a mystic overtones. But what is certain is that inspiration is a by-product of writing, not to start writing when you have inspiration, but only by constantly writing can you encounter inspiration.

If your intuition tells you something directional, you may as well follow your intuition. Intuition and epiphany are the product of our long-term thinking, reading, observation, and analysis, and are easy to produce in a relatively relaxed state, so we have to combine work and leisure, if there is no progress in research for a certain period of time, you are very distressed, you may wish to put it aside for a while, do another research, or do other things. Maybe after a while, you'll suddenly get inspired. While constantly thinking, leaving yourself some room for leisure will help to generate inspiration.

When I was doing my phD thesis myself, there was no progress for a long time. In October 2008, I had to pre-defend, and in July and August, I was just collecting a lot of materials and didn't know how to organize them. At this time, I interviewed a little girl who had just graduated from junior high school, talking about some of her experiences in middle school, the interaction between the children of migrant workers and local students in Shanghai, why she chose vocational schools, vocational schools, and so on. Suddenly, I was enlightened, and it was as if I had an epiphany in my head, my thinking was clear in an instant, and I had a feeling of a fountain of thoughts. By the end of September, the first draft of the paper was successfully completed.

Inspiration does not know when to come, only by constantly working, constantly writing, it is possible to meet key characters or key information to ignite their own ideas. Only pearls cannot be made into necklaces, and a string must be used to string them together. When this rope will be generated, we don't actually know, but we can't wait for the rope to go to the pearl, we should find the pearl beforehand. With the rope in hand, we decide which pearls should be strung together and which may be discarded because their color or size is not suitable for stringing in the necklace.

Those who do research must understand one thing: useless work is a necessary effort; there will be a futile time to do research, and we have a considerable part of our energy and time to fail. Professor Li Lianjiang has a very good passage:

Academic hardships and pleasures are working at the limit in order to constantly break through themselves. As long as it is practical research, not simply making a fuss, it will never be mastered. Have research experience, can know where to touch in the dark, how far away from the cave entrance, less fear and dazedness, more patience and tenacity. The achievements that have been achieved are only confident credentials, not a guarantee of success. Unless you are willing to self-clone, the topic selection is self-pleading, the material is always complicated and difficult to understand, the literature is always half-baked, the analysis must be hollowed out, the writing is always dismal, and the publication is always like a long march. Genius should be a different theory, "flickering" must be discussed differently, the Chinese people are talented and aspiring to learn, and listening to the truth may help to enhance patience and resilience, and suffer less from obedience.

Mature scholars will not do research much easier than beginners, and previous research experience will not automatically reduce the difficulty of research. In the process of doing research, we feel that it is very uncomfortable to do useless work; but when the research is completed, we look back and find that the useless work is not really useless work, just as we can't deny the utility of the first bun because the first bun didn't feed you.

Writing is an offensive and defensive battle

Some people may write a bland paper, remember my advice, "Writing is throwing yourself into a battle." We should ask tough questions, and every good article or every good book should have a clear enemy. You need to look for the target of criticism, for opposing texts. Which literature supports your hypothesis and which literature argues against it? Whose views are you mainly opposing? Which scholars do I agree with? These questions are very important. There are many articles that seem to be "and thin mud", just to describe and summarize all the literature, such articles can not stimulate people's desire to read. A good article should be combative.

In the process of writing, we also need to balance ideas and technology. Some articles seem decent, and there are no fatal flaws in the research method, but they are boring to read, and I call such articles "exquisite mediocrity"—evidence without thought. It may prove a well-known thing with a very elaborate approach, without theoretical innovation and impact. Another type of article, which I call "conceited profundity," has very deep ideas but not enough evidence. I think that "conceited profundity" is better than "exquisite mediocrity", because the former at least provides us with verifiable insights, and it is possible to develop a good theory by later generations. Of course, it is best to be able to achieve "exquisite profundity", with both ideas and evidence.

Literature review is a "tree target" process. When writing a literature review, it is not simply to list the ideas and views of others, but to summarize the existing academic views and academic positions, and then refute them one by one. If the existing literature is all correct, then the reader will ask you where is the value of this article? Therefore, the literature review must be offensive, telling the reader that the existing literature and existing theoretical explanations are insufficient, or some are even wrong. Writing is a process of constant "patching", and the empirical analysis part is defensive, a process of continuous "patching". In the face of questions raised by peers or reviewers, we gradually build a defense system to make up for the shortcomings of the paper, although it is impossible to be perfect, but at least to avoid serious hard injuries.

Here I have a perhaps counterintuitive suggestion, don't read too much literature before writing, just read a dozen of the most important documents in the field. The so-called most important literature is the literature that cannot be avoided in the field of study. There are two kinds of literature that everyone should read: one is the classic, and everyone cites the literature. Read a few classics and you will quickly become familiar with the field, and the references to the classics should also be your references. The other is the latest literature in the field. Of course, the latest literature should come from good journals or good authors, otherwise it may be doing useless work, others may have solved this problem, and you still don't know.

Writing should pay great attention to logic, and problems with data and research methods can be remedied, and if logic is wrong in the first place, it cannot be remedied. Some of the perfect stories in reality are often suspicious. If the data is perfect in a social science paper, I am generally skeptical of this. Because it is impossible for researchers to grasp the panorama from the perspective of God, unless the data is fictional, the data we have must be imperfect. Whether it is quantitative data or qualitative data, what we can see is actually local. When it comes to some complex causal relationships and causal mechanisms, it is usually impossible to reason entirely with the help of facts. Even if we grasp all the facts, the complex causal relationship and causal mechanism will not be automatically presented, and it must be presented with the help of logical reasoning, and the narrative of the paper must serve the chain of causality. Whether it is quantitative research or qualitative research, it is essentially telling a good story. As storytellers, we should make the story believable, and logic is a crucial part of that.