Things you must know about writing a research paper
Academic research writing takes place after in-depth study and results analysis. If you are worried that a quality research paper will take a lot of your time and energy, here are the tips that might help you improve your results.
- Clearly define your research topic. If you don’t know what you are looking for, you may waste a lot of time studying facts that aren’t related to your research in any way. Try to define the main problem of your research from the very start. Choose a broader topic and do quick preliminary research to define a narrow topic with a clearly defined problem.
A proper research problem must be:
- Concise.
- Relevant.
- Researchable.
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- If you want to do interactive research, use academic search engines. The following search engine services will save you a lot of time:
iSEEK Education
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- RefSeek
- INFOMINE
- Microsoft Academic Search
- WolframAlpha
- Manage your data. While you are working on your research, it’s important to avoid the feeling of being lost in the ocean of information you’ve found. If you find an article you really like, make sure you save a link to it or add it to bookmarks. If you fail to do this, you may waste a great deal of time trying to find something you’ve found earlier.
- Make your introduction convincing. Capture your reader’s attention using interesting statistics data, shocking facts or quotes from famous people. These research writing techniques will make your work much more interesting.
- Plan your research word count in advance. A general rule is to use 10% of the general word count for writing an introduction and a conclusion. That’s why it makes sense to write the main research part first, and only then write an introduction and conclusion.
- Take into account targets set for each structural part of your research paper. An introduction must help your readers get familiar with your research problem, its goals and methods.
- A conclusion must draw a bottom line and provide a short analysis of your research results in a concise form.
- An introduction must include reference information, explain the importance of the topic and define main problems of your research.
- The literature review must include existing opinions on the chosen subject.
- The conclusion must only list the results (without any comments on them). It summarizes the main elements of your work and reflects the introduction.
- Don’t forget to emphasize how important your research is, as well and mention ways for further research on the subject.
- Make a review of sources. Collecting sources and sparing a couple of words for each of them is not one of the correct research writing strategies. Before writing a literature review, divide the sources you’ve found into groups based on the authors’ opinions. Make sure you include controversial opinions. This will make your research comprehensive.
- Use common academic clichés. Phrases like “Based on the results…”, “According to recent research…”, “This research confirms that…” will help you overcome the writer’s block.
- Use freeform writing. If at some point you find it hard to make any progress with your research paper, try freeform writing. Here’s some writingbee advice: just imagine that you are trying to explain the main points of your research to a close friend.
- Don’t edit or revise as you write; edit after you are done. After you’ve finished your research writing, put your work off till later and come back to it after a while. Make sure there are no errors, either in style or in spelling.
More often than not, writing a research paper is quite a challenging tasks that takes a lot of time and energy. At the same time, there are few better ways to increase your baggage of knowledge and improve your ability to analyze and to think critically.
