ECON5004: Communication in Economics Semester 2, 2023 Essay 1: Academic
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ECON5004: Communication in Economics
Semester 2, 2023
Assignment: Essay 1: Academic
What’s the bottom line? You need to write a 1500-word essay intended for an academic audience. The essay has to be built around a main argument that is engaged with credible academic economics literature. The essay project will proceed in 3 phases as part of a cumulative assessment: (1) a “pitch” of your main topic, (2) a first full outline of the essay, (3) writing final essay in lecture period. |
Assignment Outline
Students will draft an academic essay over the course of the first 8 weeks of the semester. The paper will be drafted in phases, with opportunities for detailed feedback, revision and improvement at each phase. Since it is not possible to write a full academic paper in 1500 words (and the research required for a full academic paper would exceed the workload requirements for this course), the essays will follow one of the following formats:1
1. Persuasive literature review. Students can write a review of the literature in a specific topic area. This will need to be more than just a summary of various papers – it will need to have a central thesis (main argument) and cite academic literature to support that argument (most likely, arguing what the main takeaway of the literature is). So, ideally, for this kind of essay the student would identify an area of literature where there is some debate, with multiple credible academic papers taking different sides of an issue. The student’s essay would then argue in support of one side of the debate, citing and acknowledging literature on both sides of the debate, but ultimately coming down in support of one side.
2. Research proposal. Students can write a proposal for a specific research project. You can think about this in a number of ways – as the narrative section of a research grant, as a proposal that one would write to receive permission to conduct research in a public sector or professional context, or as the proposal for a masters or PhD thesis. If you are choosing this option, please make it clear in your essay (e.g., in the title, or with a quick note just below the title).
Students are encouraged to select an essay format that best fits their personal and professional interests. The topic of their essay should fall under the theme of their tutorial group. The essay should use economic reasoning and evidence to support its main argument, and be based on credible academic literature in economics.
What is “credible” academic literature in economics? While there is some debate on this, a good starting point would be to draw most references from academic journals ranked in the top 500 in
the world on this listing of journals for IDEAS/RePEc:
https://ideas.repec.org/top/top.journals.simple.html
and at least 2-3 more recent citations from the top 200 journals. It is not enough just to cite papers from these journals (e.g., as secondary citations), as it is critical that you identify multiple papers from this set of journals that are directly relevant to your main argument (i.e., you should be speaking to an issue that has been debated in such journals). An argument that is so general that it would never be debated by academic economists (e.g., “trade affects the economy”), even if you can cite papers on trade, is not acceptable. An argument that is so specific it would not be directly debated in academic journals (e.g., something about the price of goods sold on campus at the University of Sydney Union) is not acceptable, though it’s fine to use a specific example as motivation for a broader issue. Given academic publishing lags, it may be hard to find published research on important and current economic issues. For example, there’s now a lot of academic literature on the impacts of COVID- 19, but less on the post-COVID inflation and potential recession. If debate on the issue has not yet emerged in the academic literature, such that you can find papers on either side of the debate, then it is not an acceptable topic. For more information searching the literature, see the end of this document.
In general the essays will have the following format: short introduction (1 or 2 short paragraphs max), evidence/exposition, short conclusion. The introduction will motivate the central argument (the “hook”), outline the main aspects of the essay, and argue for the importance of the topic of the essay. The evidence/exposition is the meat of the essay – it will bring the student’s research to bear, in outlining the evidence for the main argument or point of the essay, while the conclusion will succinctly tie up the essay.
The final submission will be capped at 1500 words, not counting literature references. Format: double spaced, 12-point font, 2.5 cm margins.
Phases and due dates
The assignment will be completed in phases. The phases are meant to build on each other.
Phase 1 (pitch abstract and presentation; 8/34 points)
In Phase 1 students will pitch their essay topic and get direction on the focus of their essay.
By Tuesday 22 August at 11:59 pm, students will submit a pitch abstract (3 points):
. A 1-sentence topic statement for their essay (the main topic or ideally the main argument they will pursue);
. What kind of essay they intend to pursue (persuasive literature review, research proposal); and
. An indication of what debate in academic economics their essay will speak to (a 3-4 sentence summary of the main prior literature, 2-4 papers). These sentences will provide citations to these main 2-4 papers (more than 4 is fine, but not required) and hence a citations list below the abstract with full citations.
Students will get feedback on their pitch abstract from their tutor by Friday 25 August. We will also hold a peer review session on Friday 25 August in which students will give and receive peer feedback on their pitch (2 points). Students failing to participate in the peer review session will receive 0/3 for the pitch abstract.
Students will prepare a maximum 1-minute verbal pitch based on their pitch abstract, which they will deliver in a tutorial group session in the week of 28 August (3 points).
A good guideline is that the typical student should expect to put at least 5- 10 hours of research into the essay before delivering the pitch in week 5. Largely writing the essay based on your own opinions and finding a few loosely-related citations to sprinkle in, is not acceptable. The best approach is for the student to start with research, first familiarizing themself with the research topic they will focus on (e.g., rapidly skimming 20-30 or more academic papers in the topic area), and honing in on a key debate or disagreement in the literature that will form the basis of their main argument.
Phase 2 (1500 words; 10/34 points): due Friday 8 September 5:00 pm
Students will create a detailed outline of their essay. More information on the format of the outline will be provided later.
Phase 2 will involve (1) participating in a live peer review session during class on 8 September (2 points), (2) having their essay read and receiving detailed written feedback from a course tutor through submitting the essay in soft copy through Canvas (4 points) on Sunday 10 September by 11:59 pm, and (3) attending a 30-minute consultation (in week of 18 September) before which the students revise their outline in light of the tutor’s written feedback, and meet the tutor in a group of 5 students to discuss their revision and any further changes (4 points).
Phase 3 (1500 words; 18/34 points): written in lecture on Friday 22 September, 6-9 pm
This is the final submission of the essay, written during the regular lecture period in week 8 and assessed by the tutorial group marker.
Grading Weight
Overall, the academic essay carries 34% of the grading weight for the course.
Tools for Searching Academic Literature
If you have a basic topic or even potential main argument in mind, you can use online tools to try to refine your ideas and discover the most relevant literature to your topic.
Google Scholar
Google Scholar provides a useful way to forward- and backward-search specific research papers, allowing you to identify the discourse around them.
. On the left, you can set the time period. For example, if you want more recent literature you might limit it to “Since 2015.”
. You can click Cite and it will give you a citation you can copy-paste in many format.
. “Cited by …” shows how you many other papers have cited this one. This can be a good hint to find other authors with directly relevant work.
. “Related articles” suggests related pieces of research, which may again help you find directly relevant work.
. The “All … versions” button can be helpful if the main version linked in the title is paywalled. You should be able to access paywalled papers through the University library website, but the process of doing so can be slightly tedious. If you’re conducting your essay research, you may want to quickly see the whole paper, or its citation list (another good source of ideas for directly relevant work).
AI-based Research Tools
It is the early days of AI-based writing tools. The free version of ChatGPT through OpenAI, which is based on GPT3.5, can “hallucinate” – e.g., if you ask it for academic literature, it may make up fake citations or research. GPT3.5 is also based on training data only up to 2021, and doesn’t have access to the internet. So you can try to use GPT3.5 for research, but you should be very careful to double check any outputs from it. This is definitely not to say that GPT3.5 is useless for research – it can definitely generate useful content – but you just need to be very cautious about taking it all at face value.
The more advanced model of ChatGPT is version 4.0, but that costs 20 USD per month for a Plus subscription. You can access version 4.0 of ChatGPT for free through the Microsoft Bing chatbot.
There are also other AI-powered chatbot tools, such as Google’s Bard.
AI startups have also emerged that build on the APIs of popular AI models like ChatGPT. These tools are purpose-designed for academic research, and hence may perform better than the baseline model of ChatGPT. In particular, these tools may be purpose-designed not to “hallucinate” about academic literature, and not produce fake citations. One of the best-known of these is Scite, which can respond to prompts like ChatGPT, but provides more rigorous academic
literature references with explicit citations. E.g., this is a search I ran on Scite
2023-08-18