ASSIGNMENT: 02

Learning experience as a group in Assignment 01:

“Choosing a Journal, an Article and Analyzing
Components of an Article”

Econ 409: Research Methodology and Empirical Studies

Assigned by:
Asrarul Islam Chowdhury
Professor
Department of Economics
Jahangirnagar University

Submitted by:

GROUP NO: 06

GROUP MEMBERS:
1. Nadima Din, Roll-447
2. Najia Tasnim, Roll-452
3. Rubaiya Zahan, Roll-453
4. Rifah Tasfia Ishadi, Roll-468

46 Batch
Department of Economics
Jahangirnagar University

GROUP LEADER:
Rifah Tasfia Ishadi, Roll-468
Email address: ishaditasfia@gmail.com
Phone no: 01624909221

Submission Date: 15th November, 2020

 ASSIGNMENT: 02

Learning experience as a group in Assignment 01

As a part of our first learning lesson about Research Methodology, we worked

on an assignment about analyzing each component of a chosen article from a
particular journal. After switching over numerous papers, we finally found
an interesting article and according to the preferable criteria, the journal
seemed worthwhile too. And we started analyzing the article titled as
“Ecological economics for humanity’s plague phase” published in March,
2020 on the 169th volume of the journal “Ecological Economics”, written by
William E. Rees, Professor Emeritus at the University of British Columbia,
Canada.

On the way of meeting expectation:

Keeping this global pandemic in our mind, from the very beginning we were
interested to go through a paper that discusses the possible economic outcome
in the near future after this massive plague phase happening worldwide. We
were enthusiastic about this idea of a massive change in economy from the
incident of economic paradigm shift led by the historical bubonic plague in
the European region. However, we were advised to work on an overall
discussion of the plague phase which may predict possible economical
change. We found our selected article discussing the flaws in the current
approach of Economic theories and paying the cost ecologically through a
plague phase, relating present political crises, failed economic decisions and
philosophy about Homo sapiens.

A new look about Research materials:

Before we went through this article, we’d only interact with research papers
as academic references, i.e. the contents of papers were all that mattered. But
the way a paper is structured, the research is conducted and the way it is
being presented for a particular sector of audience was solely alien to all of us.
We always correlated researching to analyzing datasets and implying
methods to sort them out and providing results at the very end, although we
had heard about qualitative methods but hadn’t interacted with any. Our
selected article happened to be a qualitative research paper where we saw the
way ending results have been derived, the thematic explanations to reach a
decision over lots of subsections and eventually yielding a revolutionary
thought as the author describes himself. We also tried to gather some
background knowledge about qualitative approaches for that matter, which
surely have widened our vision in relation to Researching and the ways it can
be conducted.

We learnt where to find the what, why and how’s of a paper, the importance
of an effective presentation within word limits, learnt new concepts such as-
the impact factor, SJR rankings, CiteScore; ways of deriving them and their
importance. We had no idea even the referencing section used to have so
many formats and also how important the depth of literature reviews can be.
The process reminded us of all those papers we had studied as references
previously and we are looking forward to discovering a lot of new angles to
this same research paper we have claimed to analyze, as we realized how little
the eyes had met the content in the past days.

Overcoming Technical challenges and embracing the blessings:

Although the pandemic format of studying and attending classes has a flavor
of isolation per se, we enjoyed some advantages of this situation too. We had
our class recorded; fortunately all our members had continuous network
availability. However, we had to keep our individual ways of exploring on
check so that we don’t end up being too different to merge our effort and edit
our work over and over again as figuring everything out virtually on one take
seemed impossible in this set up.

In conclusion, we have found the assignment about analyzing a research

article as a stepping stone in the vast realm of the world that probes through
how researchers think while presenting their work, at least structurally. A
scholarly author who has been working for more than 40 years in his field, we
have just tried to walk along his way of thinking. We faced difficulty
processing several concepts about interdisciplinary fields, as he brought
Ecology, Economics, Thermodynamics and Political Science under one
discussion. Overall this has been an exhaustive but enlightening experience
for all of us.