For the social scientist, writing is an essential skill.
If you are an MA or PhD student, or post-doctoral scholar, or professor young, old, recent, or established – writing is an essential skill.
You write many things. You write texts and emails. Social media posts. Notes, reports, and literature reviews. But empirical research articles in the social sciences remain your most important and long-lasting form of scientific communication. These articles are your way to share what you know with other scientists. These articles shape the future of the social sciences. They are your scientific legacy.
As a social scientist, you are a writer. Writing is what you do. You may not like it. You may love it. Whatever your disposition, writing is the essential skill. And what should you do if your job requires an essential skill? You seek to get better at the essential skill.
This short book, written foolishly at the dawn of the AI era, is about writing empirical articles in the social sciences. It is not about writing books or NGO reports or emails. It is only about one thing, and that one thing is the world’s most prevalent form of social science communication.
I designed this book for both absolute beginners in their graduate school career and for those who have already written and published a few articles.
There are many books about writing, but very few specifically for the social sciences, and even fewer specifically about empirical research articles. This book is one of the few.
This book is free and self-published. I will release versions as I improve on the chapters and add new things and find typos and formatting errors. Nobody’s perfect.
Here it is:
Joshua Dubrow, Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Polish Academy of Sciences
July 2026, V.1
Copyright © 2026 Joshua Dubrow
Published by Occam’s Press
This book is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0). You may copy, distribute, display, adapt, and build upon this work for any purpose, including commercial purposes, provided that you give appropriate credit to the author, provide a link to the license, and indicate whether changes were made.
License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
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Suggested citation
Dubrow, Joshua. 2026. How to Write an Empirical Research Article in the Social Sciences. Occam’s Press.
Suggested attribution for reuse
Dubrow, Joshua. 2026. How to Write an Empirical Research Article in the Social Sciences. Occam’s Press. Licensed under CC BY 4.0. Changes were made [if applicable].
Joshua K. Dubrow is a PhD from The Ohio State University and a Professor of Sociology at the Polish Academy of Sciences.
The Sociology Place 