10.2 Draft Paper

Begin creating a draft that will evolve into a journal article manuscript. The writing does not need to be polished but you should make at least one dedicated pass at editing before you submit your draft.

10.2.1 Formatting

Your draft should be formatted as it would be for your final submission so that formatting can be a piece of the peer review process. This assignment follows the American Journal of Sociology formatting guidelines with the following exceptions/clarifications:

  1. Your target length for this assignment is approximately 5,000 words all inclusive - citations, tables, and notes all count towards this total. You should be within 500 words of this target (i.e. between 4,500 and 5,500 words). Manuscripts should use 1" margins with 12 point, serif font.
  2. The first page should be a cover page with a title, word count, 3 to 5 key words, your name, your affiliation, and your contact information (professional address, email). Use the “Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Saint Louis University, 3700 Lindell Blvd., St. Louis MO 63108” if you need a professional address.
  3. All in-text and works cited references should follow the American Sociological Association citation standards. See my discussion under “[General Structure of Annotated Bibliography]” for details on why ASA is the only accepted format.

Please read the American Journal of Sociology guidelines for additional details and requirements.

Like citation styles, journals are often idiosyncratic in their formatting guidelines. Each journal is a little bit different from the next and requires different things in its instructions to authors. There is therefore not just one way to submit an article. This project is structured to walk you through some of the mechanics of authoring an article manuscript, which includes formatting an article in an often foreign and exacting manner. There are critiques to journals operating this way, and I think many of them are valid. Nevertheless, these standards remain and becoming fluent in conforming to them is a skill that graduate students must acquire.

10.2.2 Contents

At the draft stage, papers should include as a minimum:

  1. A cover page,
  2. a draft abstract,
  3. a draft body that includes:
    • Introduction
    • Background
    • Data and Methods
  4. a draft works cited section,
  5. any expository end-notes,
  6. and at least one draft table and one draft figure.

All numbered sections (and each table and figure) should begin on their own page. The Background, Data and Methods, and other paper sections should not begin on their own page.

Some students do not like to write the introduction first, preferring to write the rest of the paper and then return to the intro. I think it is important to at least draft an introduction first that gives you a strong starting place. Think of this as building a foundation for the rest of the paper. Here are some tips from Dr. Raul Pacheco-Vega.

The Background section should contain your literature review. Remember that you need to draw your literature together and provide analysis - you should absolutely not summarize one article, then summarize another, and so on. This takes practice, and Dr. Pacheco-Vega also provides some tips for distinguishing between description and analysis in academic writing. Dr. Pacheco-Vega also has a great post on converting your annotated bibliography into a literature review.

The Data and Methods section should contain greater detail than a typical journal article manuscript. Please be sure to reference and cite all packages that you use, and to describe extensively the process you followed cleaning and analyzing your data. Be sure to dedicate space in this section to describing the distribution of your dependent variable.