Writing the Economics Research Article
This is the companion site to the book. It holds the corpus the book is based on, the definitions behind every count, and the programs that produced the numbers — plus two tools: search the corpus yourself, and check your own draft against it.
Check your draft →
Paste your paper and see how its hedging, connective density, introduction share, conclusion length and opening conventions compare with 103 published economics articles.
Runs entirely in your browser. Nothing is uploaded.
Search the corpus →
Concordance search across 674,000 words of published economics writing, with collocates, section distribution, and the position of each hit in the paper.
Try we exploit, consistent with, or rule out.
Explore the categories →
Browse the book's categories as data: every hedge, booster, connective, signpost, rhetorical move and reporting verb, with rates and real examples.
Methods and definitions →
What counts as a hedge, and how it was counted. The word lists, the counting rules, and the decisions behind them — the material that is too technical for the book.
What the book found
A few of the patterns documented in the book, all recomputable from the material on this site:
How the analysis works
The corpus is tagged so that programs can see its structure: section headings, subsections, abstracts, references. A set of measures then counts features — hedges, boosters, connectives, citations, tense and voice — according to word lists and rules kept as editable files. Two classifications that no program can make reliably (the structural family of each paper, and the niche strategy of each introduction) were coded by hand from corpus evidence.
Every number in the book comes out of that pipeline, and re-running it regenerates them all together. The workspace page describes the components and the procedure in more detail, and links to the code.
A note on what this is not
The corpus is a sample: 103 research articles, plus 32 short Economics Letters papers analysed separately. It shows strong regularities, but it is a window on the discipline rather than a census of it. Conventions are not rules — if your writing diverges from a pattern here, that is a prompt to check the divergence is deliberate, not evidence that you are wrong.