Writing the Research Article
A series of corpus-based writing guides, one discipline at a time. Each book documents what published authors in that field actually do — how they open, where they place their claims, how much they hedge. Each has a companion site here holding the corpus, the definitions behind every count, and a tool for checking your own draft against them.
Disciplines
Economics →
Research articles and short papers from sixteen economics and econometrics journals. Search the corpus, browse the categories, or paste your draft for a comparison.
Further disciplines
Companion sites for the other books in the series are in preparation. Each will carry the same tools over its own corpus, so that a writer in any field can compare a draft against the conventions of that field rather than a general average.
Why corpus evidence
Most writing guides tell you what good academic writing should look like. These start from the other end: they examine what published writers in a discipline actually produce, and describe the patterns that emerge. The point is not to prescribe. Conventions are not rules — but knowing them turns an unconscious habit into a deliberate choice, and makes any departure from them your own.
Openness
The corpora are drawn from open-access articles published under a Creative Commons licence, which is what allows them to be redistributed here in full, with attribution. The word lists, the counting rules and the analysis programs are published alongside them, so that any number in any of the books can be traced to the text it came from — or recomputed from scratch.
Published by Athelstan. Corpora derived from the Elsevier OA CC-BY Corpus (Kershaw & Koeling, 2020), used under CC BY 4.0.