Before you write an academic paper, you first need to decide on your topic. A good choice of topic is at least half of success. The basic principles of choosing a topic are:
(1) Choose a problem that interests you. For students without academic interest, scientific research will be a very painful thing and will be detrimental to their physical and mental health. Each student in the search for the selection of the first to find their own real interest in the issue, because the driving force to promote academic research is precisely curiosity, is to solve the guessing game when the kind of pure intellectual pleasure. Some students may be more utilitarian, hoping to choose a topic that will help them in their career development, which often leads to the homogenization of their choice of topics, or too empty.
(2) Choose a problem that can be solved by the theories and practical experimental conditions you have mastered. Another characteristic of Chinese students is that they always want to choose the most meaningful topic. This is certainly not wrong, but there are certain misunderstandings. There are too many meaningful topics, but we can only choose our own topics within the existing constraints. This constraint is our theoretical foundation and experimental conditions. Let's say that an undergraduate student with limited theoretical knowledge is bound to have difficulty in choosing a graduate student topic, or, alternatively, a topic that is not allowed by laboratory conditions is impossible to accomplish. Many meaningful questions are temporarily beyond our grasp in terms of reality, so we can only regretfully give up. For example, how to be happy in life can be said to be one of the most meaningful topics, but what methods can you use to study this problem? For example, female students studying in the United States and male students compared to the road faster, because male students always want to do China's economic reform of the general idea of such a big problem, while female students are more down-to-earth in accordance with the mentor's advice to collect data, modeling, tuning parameters, the results are more likely to produce results.
(3) Try to make the problem as detailed as possible, don't choose big and empty problems. A big and empty problem can only show that you haven't thought a problem through clearly. For example, if you choose the topic is "China's balance of payments", the reader can not tell what you really want to study, in fact, this may be more suitable for a course title rather than a dissertation title. A preferable title, for example, might be "Why China has both current account and capital account surpluses". (4) Subject to the first three conditions, try to choose an issue that will be of interest to others. Everyone wants his or her article to be read by more readers, and this may pose a "dilemma" when writing an economics paper, which, by nature, cannot have many readers. A first-rate economics journal may be written by 500 people and read by 500 people. However, exceptions are not unheard of. I recall an article in the Journal of Political Economy on the political economy of the fairy tale The Wizard of Oz, which, according to the author's testimony, was actually a political allegory reflecting the controversy surrounding the reform of the U.S. monetary system. The essay was highly regarded by Friedman. In fact, it is not at all one of those very technical academic papers, and its brilliance lies in finding a good angle of analysis. Zhang Wuchang's "The Fable of the Bees" is also similar. Imagine a farm in a bright spring day, with the fragrance of flowers wafting around, and bees busying themselves among the flowers, while economists ponder over the issue of property rights at the side. It's so romantic and poetic, how could anyone not clamor for a glimpse?