Tips and resources for research
3 THINGS I LEARNED FROM SENIOR COLLEAGUES
If you get a revise and resubmit, you may think that referees' comments are just suggestions and that you can decide which ones to pay attention to. That is not the case. Take every single comment seriously, implement it as best possible, and give a detailed and respectful reply to the reviewer showing your work and how you tried to integrate it into the paper.
If you get rejected from good journal and receive good feedback from the editor and referees, you can use those letters when submitting the paper to another journal. Just attach the letters and give the editor information about manuscript ID from the previous journal so that they can validate it if necessary. If you are lucky, the new journal will not request any new referee reports and your paper will move forward with much less hassle. Just make sure to respond to all comments according to point 1 above before you submit to the new journal.
Don't be shy about contacting researchers in your field for feedback. E-mail them a draft, saying that your paper may interest them and that you would appreciate any feedback. You may be surprised at how generous researchers can be with providing comments on your work. Worst case scenario is that they don't have time to respond, which is fine, and at least they will have heard of you.
WRITING
4 steps to an applied micro paper by Jesse Shapiro
46 excellent slides on writing as a social scientist by David Eil
10 Tips on How to Write Less Badly by Michael Munger
The Ten Most Important Rules of Writing by Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz
"Never complain of being misunderstood. You can choose to be understood, or you can choose not to."
PRESENTING
How to Give an Applied Micro Talk by Jesse Shapiro
Public Speaking for Academic Economists by Rachael Meager
My idiosyncratic summary of the above two headings:
keep it as short and simple as possible,
keep practicing and revising,
and you are off to a great start. But don't forget you need to:
3. sell your work!
That is, realize that you need to be confident in describing and interpreting your work if you want others to be confident in it is as well.
MANAGING PROJECTS
Code and Data for the Social Sciences: A Practitioner's Guide by Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse Shapiro
Enhance your Productivity and Software Quality with Techniques from Silicon Valley by Benjamin Skrainka
Embrace your Fallibility: Thoughts on Code Integrity by Nick Eubank
Data Cleaning by Marc Bellemare
Naming files by Jenny Bryan
SOFTWARE
Interactive intro to R for Stata users by Richard Blissett
Slack for creating project-specific chat rooms to facilitate talking to other team members.
Jabref for creating and managing bibliography files. It has a built-in Google Scholar search to quickly add citations.
HARDWARE
I am a fan of mechanical keyboards as they are more comfortable to type on (and make perfect clickety-clack sounds when typing). Given the time we spend using keyboards, they're well worth the investment.
ECONOMETRICS
Why, when and how to cluster standard errors by Cameron and Miller
Two tools for inference with imperfect IVs by Clarke and Matta
Estimating distributional impacts (and not only averages) by Bedoya et al.
Introduction to when and why to use weighting by Solon, Haider and Wooldridge
Is it necessary to run balance tests in randomized experiments? by David McKenzie
Why not to use higher-order polynomials in RD by David McKenzie
Regression adjustment in randomized experiments by Winston Lin
Standard errors with small clusters by Jed Friedman
The value of calculating within-cluster correlations by David McKenzie
Marc Bellemare's blog has a number of useful discussions of commonly used econometric techniques, including many pitfalls to avoid. See Metrics monday.
OTHER
Mentoring for young faculty (about teaching, publishing, and more) by Jessica Hoel
The AEA committee on women in economic has a great newsletter that is useful for anyone to read
Chris Blattman's advice blog posts, see the menu bar