Writing a Research Paper

If you are a college or university student studying for one or another professional or academic qualification, chances are that you will have to undertake a research project as part of your course - and write a research paper out of it.

Many people view the task of writing a research paper as a difficult one; which it need not be if you go about it in the right way. Incidentally, most of the people who come to experience difficulties when writing their research papers tend to be those who opt to do it at the very last moment (when the deadline is fast approaching), which more often than not leads to not only the perception that research paper writing is a difficult undertaking, but also in mediocre results. Therefore, the first step towards easy research paper writing is making adequate time for the task, and ideally starting on it as soon as you are given the assignment; rather than waiting for the deadline to draw near before getting started. Research-paper writing is usually preceded by the identification of a research topic. The way this is done varies from school to school, and even from course to course. In some schools, the instructors walk with the students through the process of research topic identification; whereas in some schools, it is upon the students to work out a research topic for themselves- and then submit it to their instructors for approval (or rejection).

Research topic identification done away with, the next step towards research paper writing is undertaking the research itself; and recording (in raw form) the findings that are later to go into the research paper. Depending on the subject of study at hand, the methods used for the research might be anything from simply going into the library and reading what various authors have to say on the research topic, getting into a laboratory and conducting laboratory research on the topic given and the various things that appertain to it, or yet still going out into the community, conducting interviews and surveys, and putting the data revealed on the surveys together in the research paper.

When it finally gets to putting down your research findings onto paper (in writing the research paper), the task of research-paper writing has to start with the creation of a title page for the whole document (though some schools, especially those using MLM style of writing) might not insist on the need for the use of the title page. The title page is followed by a table of contents - though this might be a bit superfluous for the smallest of research papers. Still, it is best to include a table of content to make the work more professional-looking. The table of contents is typically followed by an introduction, which is in turn followed by the body of research paper (describing the research and its findings).

This has to be written as per the rules of academic writing (in terms of the tone, proper citation and so on). The rules of academic writing have, of course, to be employed in keeping with the general rules of good writing, including use of short clear sentences, avoidance of ambiguities, use of logical paragraphs and so on. At the end of it research paper is a conclusion section, simply made of the conclusions made from the research, followed by glossaries of abbreviations (and other things that might need special explanations) used in the document; followed by a bibliography, where all literature cited in the research paper is credited.