Frank DiTraglia on how to read econometrics papers

Reading economics research papers is hard work when you are doing it for the first time as a graduate student. That's why I try to get as many undergraduate students as possible engaged in some 'inspectional reading' (a term I learned from Marc Bellamare's book Doing Economics, which I reviewed here), through the Waikato Economics Discussion Group. The hardest papers to read are papers in econometrics. Hard, but unfortunately necessary for students and researchers who want to apply the latest methods to their analyses, or who want to understand fully the canonical methods in econometrics.

So, it was interesting to read Frank DiTraglia's advice recently on how to read econometrics papers. Econometrics papers don't really lend themselves to 'inspectional reading', because the purpose of reading them is to understand the methods, and the actual results and simulations used to illustrate those methods are often incidental to this purpose.

DiTraglia offers a number of tips for readers (targeted at graduate students, but of use to other readers as well), including:

1. Reading more recent articles that apply the method, or reading review articles, rather than reading the original paper that introduces a particular method;
2. Don't assume that you have to understand the whole thing when you read a paper, but focus on understanding the key ideas;
3. Don't assume that you're stupid if you don't understand the paper, because key details that the authors assume you know about may be left out of the paper (which means reading other articles is doubly important);
4. Try explaining the key ideas to someone else, because as anyone who has done any teaching can tell you, you only really recognise how little you really understand, when you go to try and teach it to someone else; and
5. Head straight to the simulation or empirical example, rather than getting bogged down in the equations.

DiTraglia offers other points of advice as well, but I think those are the key points for most people who aren't going to get deep into the weeds of how a particular method works. Personally, I can vouch for #1 and #5 as really helping me to understand some econometrics papers, but especially #1. In my experience, the first person to develop a particular method is often rubbish at explaining it. It is only the subsequent authors, applying the method themselves and writing papers (who are really doing #4 from DiTraglia's list when they write up their research), who are really helpful in understanding the method.

[HT: Both David McKenzie on the Development Impact blog, and Marginal Revolution]