How to research for a research paper
A research paper is a piece of academic writing based on its author’s original research on a particular topic, and the analysis and interpretation of the research findings. It can be either a term paper, a master’s thesis or a doctoral dissertation. The arguments you provide in your paper should be based on this cenral idea, that is why it is so important. Thesis statement should be provided early in your paper – in the introduction part, or in the second paragraph, if your paper is is impossible to create a thesis statement immediately when you have just started fulfilling your assignment. The paper should present something new to the audience to make it interesting and educative to citing other authors in this section. Research paper basically has the following structure:Title page (including the title, the author’s name, the name of a university or colledge, and the publication date). Body, which can be broken down in further sections, depending on the nature of research:Materials and s (what are the results obtained). It helps an author to make their key points clear for him/her and arrange mes the students are asked to submit formal outlines with their research a formal outline, numbers and letters are used to arrange topics and subtopics. The topics denoted by their headings and subheadings should be grouped in a logical points of a research paper outline must relate to the same major topic that you first mentioned in your capital roman e of an outline:I. Make the first outline uction – state your thesis and the purpose of your research paper clearly. Explain briefly the major points you plan to cover in your paper and why readers should be interested in your – this is where you present your arguments to support your thesis statement. Here you will analyze, synthesize, sort, and digest the information you have gathered and hopefully learn something about your topic which is the real purpose of doing a research paper in the first place. You must also be able to effectively communicate your thoughts, ideas, insights, and research findings to others through written words as in a report, an essay, a research or term paper, or through spoken words as in an oral or multimedia presentation with audio-visual not include any information that is not relevant to your topic, and do not include information that you do not understand. Mark each card or sheet of paper clearly with your outline code or reference, e. Ib2a or iic, all your note cards or paper in the order of your outline, e. If using a word processor, create meaningful filenames that match your outline codes for easy cut and paste as you type up your final paper, e. Before you know it, you have a well organized term paper completed exactly as it is helpful to you, use a symbol such as “#” to mark the spot where you would like to check back later to edit a paragraph. Reorganize your outline if necessary, but always keep the purpose of your paper and your readers in mind. Correct all errors that you can spot and improve the overall quality of the paper to the best of your ability. Did i leave a sense of completion for my reader(s) at the end of the paper? This edition recommends a single universal set of guidelines, which writers can apply to any kind of should necessarily ask your instuctor which formatting style is required for your paper and format it accordingly before 8.
Academic research paper guidelines
Know how your essay will be ead final paper carefully for spelling, punctuation, missing or duplicated words. Make the effort to ensure that your final paper is clean, tidy, neat, and to have your final paper ready a day or two before the deadline. Guideshow to write a research ch, writing and style tation tips for public for a research moreliterature guidesanimal farm. Writing tanding writing g a research and the research fying ting questions & topics ted bibliographies. How to navigate the new printing this page, you must include the entire legal notice at g a research y: this handout provides detailed information about how to write research papers including discussing research papers as a genre, choosing topics, and finding butors:jack raymond baker, allen brizee, ashley velzquezlast edited: 2013-02-21 10:38: will come a time in most students' careers when they are assigned a research paper. Writing a research paper is an essential aspect of academics and should not be avoided on account of one's anxiety. In fact, the process of writing a research paper can be one of the more rewarding experiences one may encounter in academics. What is more, many students will continue to do research throughout their careers, which is one of the reasons this topic is so ng an experienced researcher and writer in any field or discipline takes a great deal of practice. Remember, even the most seasoned academic veterans have had to learn how to write a research paper at some point in their career. And, perhaps most important of all, patience, a student will find that she can achieve great things through her research and handout will include the following sections related to the process of writing a research paper:Genre- this section will provide an overview for understanding the difference between an analytical and argumentative research ng a topic- this section will guide the student through the process of choosing topics, whether the topic be one that is assigned or one that the student chooses fying an audience- this section will help the student understand the often times confusing topic of audience by offering some basic guidelines for the do i begin- this section concludes the handout by offering several links to resources at purdue, and also provides an overview of the final stages of writing a research the owl you're requesting copies of this the owl you're linking to this ght ©1995-2017 by the writing lab & the owl at purdue and purdue rights reserved. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our terms and conditions of fair sity of southern zing your social sciences research paper. Choosing a research purpose of this guide is to provide advice on how to develop and organize a research paper in the social of research flaws to ndent and dependent ry of research terms. Choosing a research ing a topic ning a topic ing the timeliness of a topic idea. An oral g with g someone else's to manage group of structured group project survival g a book le book review ing collected g a field informed g a policy g a research proposal. London: sage, ng a research problem / how to not assume that choosing a research problem to study will be a quick or easy task! There are generally three ways you are asked to write about a research problem: 1) your professor provides you with a general topic from which you study a particular aspect; 2) your professor provides you with a list of possible topics to study and you choose a topic from that list; or, 3) your professor leaves it up to you to choose a topic and you only have to obtain permission to write about it before beginning your investigation. For example, your professor wants the class to focus on the following research problem: “is the european union a credible security actor with the capacity to contribute to confronting global terrorism? You can begin by doing any or all of the following: reading through background information from materials listed in your course syllabus; searching the usc libraries catalog to find a recent book on the topic and, if appropriate, more specialized works about the topic; conducting a preliminary review of the research literature using multidisciplinary library databases such as proquestt or subject-specific databases found here. Don’t be surprised if you need to do this several times before you finalize how to approach writing about the : always review the references from your most relevant research results cited by the authors in footnotes, endnotes, or a bibliography to locate related research on your topic. This is a good strategy for identifying important prior research about the topic because titles that are repeatedly cited indicate their significance in laying a foundation for understanding the problem. However, if you’re having trouble at this point locating relevant research literature, ask a librarian for help!
This link indicates how many times other researchers have subsequently cited that article since it was first published. Finding additional cited by references from your original list of cited by references helps you navigate through the literature and, by so doing, understand the evolution of thought around a particular research 3: since social science research papers are generally designed to get you to develop your own ideas and arguments, look for sources that can help broaden, modify, or strengthen your initial thoughts and arguments [for example, if you decide to argue that the european union is ill prepared to take on responsibilities for broader global security because of the debt crisis in many eu countries, then focus on identifying sources that support as well as refute this position]. Therefore, one way that you can use a source is to describe the counter-argument, provide evidence from your review of the literature as to why the prevailing argument is unsatisfactory, and to discuss how your own view is more appropriate based upon your interpretation of the s of new ideas -- while a general goal in writing college research papers in the social sciences is to approach a research problem with some basic idea of what position you'd like to take and what grounds you'd like to stand upon, it is certainly acceptable [and often encouraged] to read the literature and extend, modify, and refine your own position in light of the ideas proposed by others. This can help to demonstrate familiarity with developments in relevant scholarship about your topic, provide a means of comparing historical versus contemporary issues and events, and identifying key people, places, and things that had an important role related to the research s of interdisciplinary insight -- an advantage of using databases like proquest to begin exploring your topic is that it covers publications from a variety of different disciplines. You may think you'll remember what you have searched and where you found things, but it’s easy to forget or get 4: assuming you've done an effective job of synthesizing and thinking about the results of our initial search for related literature, you're ready to prepare a detailed outline for your paper that lays the foundation for a more in-depth and focused review of relevant research literature [after consulting with a librarian, if needed! A good indication is that you start composing your paper outline and gaps appear in how you want to approach the study. An effective instructor should never include a topic that is so obscure or complex that no research is available to examine and from which to begin to design a study. You're going to be working on your topic for quite some time, so choose one that you find interesting and engaging or that motivates you to take a you’ve settled on a topic of interest from the list, follow steps 1 - 4 listed above to further develop it into a research : it’s ok to review related literature to help refine how you will approach analyzing a topic, and then discover that the topic isn’t all that interesting to you. How to begin: your professor leaves it up to you to choose a 1: under this scenario, the key process is turning an idea or general thought into a topic that can be configured into a research problem. When given an assignment where you choose the research topic, don't begin by thinking about what to write about, but rather, ask yourself the question, "what do i want to know? Use this coverage to refine your idea into something that you'd like to investigate further but in a more deliberate, scholarly way based on a particular problem that needs to be 3: to build upon your initial idea, use the suggestions under this tab to help narrow, broaden, or increase the timeliness of your idea so you can write it out as a research you are comfortable with having turned your idea into a research problem, follow steps 1 - 4 listed in part i above to further develop it into a research an, jim. Ces for identifying a you are having difficulty identifying a topic to study or need basic background information, the following web resources and databases can be useful:Cq researcher -- a collection of single-themed public policy reports providing an overview of the issue, background information, and chronology. Foreign and domestic research reports, position papers, and other documents from think tanks, research institutes, and agencies. Updated science research network -- a service providing scholarly research papers, working papers, and journals in numerous social science ptions of resources are adapted or quoted from vendor thinking about a research topic to study, don't adopt the mindset of pursuing an esoteric or incredibly complicated topic just to impress your professor but that, in reality, does not have any real interest to you. University of southern e to the purdue printing this page, you must include the entire legal notice at butors:jack raymond baker, allen brizee, ashley y:this handout provides detailed information about how to write research papers including discussing research papers as a genre, choosing topics, and finding g a research paperthe research will come a time in most students' careers when they are assigned a research paper. And, perhaps most important of all, patience, a student will find that she can achieve great things through her research and handout will include the following sections related to the process of writing a research paper:Genre- this section will provide an overview for understanding the difference between an analytical and argumentative research ng a topic- this section will guide the student through the process of choosing topics, whether the topic be one that is assigned or one that the student chooses fying an audience- this section will help the student understand the often times confusing topic of audience by offering some basic guidelines for the do i begin- this section concludes the handout by offering several links to resources at purdue, and also provides an overview of the final stages of writing a research butors:jack raymond baker, allen brizee, ashley y:this handout provides detailed information about how to write research papers including discussing research papers as a genre, choosing topics, and finding and the research paperresearch: what it is. Research paper is the culmination and final product of an involved process of research, critical thinking, source evaluation, organization, and composition. It is, perhaps, helpful to think of the research paper as a living thing, which grows and changes as the student explores, interprets, and evaluates sources related to a specific topic. Primary and secondary sources are the heart of a research paper, and provide its nourishment; without the support of and interaction with these sources, the research paper would morph into a different genre of writing (e. The research paper serves not only to further the field in which it is written, but also to provide the student with an exceptional opportunity to increase her knowledge in that field. It is also possible to identify a research paper by what it is ch: what it is not.
Research paper is not simply an informed summary of a topic by means of primary and secondary sources. The goal of a research paper is not to inform the reader what others have to say about a topic, but to draw on what others have to say about a topic and engage the sources in order to thoughtfully offer a unique perspective on the issue at hand. This is accomplished through two major types of research major types of research ntative research paper:The argumentative research paper consists of an introduction in which the writer clearly introduces the topic and informs his audience exactly which stance he intends to take; this stance is often identified as the thesis statement. An important goal of the argumentative research paper is persuasion, which means the topic chosen should be debatable or controversial. The student would support this thesis throughout her paper by means of both primary and secondary sources, with the intent to persuade her audience that her particular interpretation of the situation is ical research paper:The analytical research paper often begins with the student asking a question (a. Research may lead him to the following f is a poem whose purpose it was to serve as an exemplum of heterodoxy for tenth- and eleventh-century monastic his topic may be debatable and controversial, it is not the student's intent to persuade the audience that his ideas are right while those of others are wrong. Instead, his goal is to offer a critical interpretation of primary and secondary sources throughout the paper--sources that should, ultimately, buttress his particular analysis of the topic. In fact, the thesis statement in an analytical paper is often more fluid than the thesis in an argumentative paper. Such is one of the benefits of approaching the topic without a predetermined butors:jack raymond baker, allen brizee, ashley y:this handout provides detailed information about how to write research papers including discussing research papers as a genre, choosing topics, and finding ng a topicthe first step of any research paper is for the student to understand the assignment. Student will often encounter one of two situations when it comes to choosing a topic for a research paper. Many first-time researchers appreciate such an arrangement by the instructor because it eliminates the stress of having to decide upon a topic on their r, the student may also find the topics that have been provided to be limiting; moreover, it is not uncommon for the student to have a topic in mind that does not fit with any of those provided. Be respectful, and ask the instructor if the topic you have in mind would be a possible research option for the assignment. Remember, as a first-time researcher, your knowledge of the process is quite limited; the instructor is experienced, and may have very precise reasons for choosing the topics she has offered to the class. If not, do not take it personally and choose the topic from the list that seems most interesting to second situation occurs when the instructor simply hands out an assignment sheet that covers the logistics of the research paper, but leaves the choice of topic up to the student. Typically, assignments in which students are given the opportunity to choose the topic require the topic to be relevant to some aspect of the course; so, keep this in mind as you begin a course in which you know there will be a research paper near the end. Instead, realize that it takes practice to become an experienced researcher in any a discussion of evaluating sources, see evaluating sources of s for choosing a ng early leads to starting early. Brainstorming is often a successful way for students to get some of these ideas down on paper. Research topics are often fluid, and dictated more by the student's ongoing research than by the original chosen topic. Such fluidity is common in research, and should be embraced as one of its many purdue owl also offers a number of other resources on choosing and developing a topic:Understanding writing ng the writing ion slide butors:jack raymond baker, allen brizee, ashley y:this handout provides detailed information about how to write research papers including discussing research papers as a genre, choosing topics, and finding fying an audienceidentifying an concept of audience can be very confusing for novice researchers. Should the student's audience be her instructor only, or should her paper attempt to reach a larger academic crowd? Therefore, it is important for the student to articulate an audience that falls somewhere in is perhaps helpful to approach the audience of a research paper in the same way one would when preparing for an oral presentation.
So it is with writing a research paper (in fact, you may need to transform your written work into an oral work if you find yourself presenting at a conference someday). Instructor should be considered only one member of the paper's audience; he is part of the academic audience that desires students to investigate, research, and evaluate a topic. Try to imagine an audience that would be interested in and benefit from your example: if the student is writing a twelve page research paper about ethanol and its importance as an energy source of the future, would she write with an audience of elementary students in mind? What is more, she would assume the audience to be at a certain educational level; therefore, she would not spend time in such a short research paper defining terms and concepts already familiar to those in the field. One of the purposes of a research paper is to add something new to the academic community, and the first-time researcher should understand her role as an initiate into a particular community of scholars. Once again, practice lies at the heart of the butors:jack raymond baker, allen brizee, ashley y:this handout provides detailed information about how to write research papers including discussing research papers as a genre, choosing topics, and finding do i begin? Is neither template nor shortcut for writing a research paper; again, the process is, amongst other things, one of practice, experience, and organization, and begins with the student properly understanding the assignment at many college students know, the writer may find himself composing three quite different research papers for three quite different courses all at the same time in a single semester. Each of these papers may have varying page lengths, guidelines, and ore, in order for a student to become an experienced researcher and writer, she must not only pay particular attention to the genre, topic, and audience, but must also become skilled in researching, outlining, drafting, and a discussion of where to begin one's research, see research: ing is an integral part of the process of writing. No drafting should take place without a research question or thesis statement; otherwise, the student will find himself writing without a purpose or direction. The research the student has completed is a vast sea of information through which he must navigate; without a compass, the student will be tossed aimlessly about by the waves of sources. Jack raymond baker, allen brizee, ashley y:this handout provides detailed information about how to write research papers including discussing research papers as a genre, choosing topics, and finding g a research paper: generating questions & topics workshopthis workshop discusses strategies for getting started on a research paper, including generating questions and ideas for topics. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our terms and conditions of fair ript must be enabled for the correct page ping a research 's absolutely essential to develop a research question that you're interested in or care about in order to focus your research and your paper (unless, of course, your instructor gives you a very specific assignment). For example, researching a broad topic such as "business management" is difficult since there may be hundreds of sources on all aspects of business management. Is easier to research and can be covered more fully and in more do you develop a usable research question? Choose an appropriate topic or issue for your research, one that actually can be researched (exercise 1). Sometimes the number of sources you find will help you discover whether your research question is too broad, too narrow, or okay? You know a lot about the topic, you can develop a research question based on your own knowledge. For example, if you're assigned a research topic on an issue confronting the ancient babylonian family, remember, by virtue of your own family life, you already know a great deal about family issues. Once you determine what you do know, then you're ready to do some general reading in a textbook or encyclopedia in order to develop a usable research 's a good idea to evaluate your research question before completing the research exercise (exercise 3) and to ask the writing tutor for feedback on your research question. But the important thing to remember is that you should stick with just one major topic per essay or research paper in order to have a coherent piece of issue is a concept upon which you can take a stand. A question that is neither too broad or too example, if you choose juvenile delinquency (a topic that can be researched), you might ask the following questions:What is the 1994 rate of juvenile delinquency in the u.
Question "b" is too broad; it implies that the researcher will cover many tactics for reducing juvenile delinquency that could be used throughout the country.
