How to write a research paper

5 Tips on Writing an Effective Research Paper

The scientific world has its clearly established and generally accepted rules in the academic world, which allow considering a scientific paper as a research. If you are interested in getting to the heart of things, trying to understand, analyzing some natural phenomenon or discovering something new, then you must have been wondering how to properly summarize and describe the results of a study.

Tip 1: How to choose a topic

It is very important to choose and formulate the research topic correctly. Don't choose too extensive questions to study. For example, if you want to analyze the creative activities of F. Scott Fitzgerald, then stop either at one particular life stage or thoroughly study the history of him creating a particular literary work. For example, you can analyze the role of Myrtle Wilson in "The Great Gatsby". A scientific instructor should help you with the choice of the topic.

Discuss the length of the paper with your instructor. It varies depending on the level of complexity. For example, the volume of a student's paper for a speech at a scientific-practical conference should be twenty or thirty sheets of text, but when it comes to a diploma paper, up to 100 printed sheets are possible.

Tip 2: Create a plan

The plan will help you organize the particular points that you want to tell the scientific community about, your thoughts on this matter and the conclusions that you draw on their basis. In the first part, you must set a goal and tell about the state of affairs in the area that you intend to investigate. Then you should describe the conducted experiments or write about your observations. In the end, summarize your observations and draw conclusions.

Tip 3: Study the topic

The possibilities of the Internet are unlimited, so you can always find all the materials that have been published recently on this issue both in your country and abroad. Make sure that the element of novelty is present in your scientific work. This is all you will describe in the first part of your research paper. The sources that you found and used in the process of writing a scientific paper should also be properly referenced in the appendix of your research paper.

Tip 4: How to structure a research paper

Study the most significant ones among the previous studies in the field you are researching. Correlate these materials with your data and draw conclusions. Keep in mind that a prerequisite for any research work is the logical, consistent arrangement of parts, as well as your own discoveries and deep conclusions with the necessary evidence.

Every research paper begins with the title page, which describes the field of work. On the title page indicate the name of the institution and the topic of your research, as well as the name of the author and scientific adviser.
Create contents of the research paper. This is a kind of a plan where the sequence of your work is listed. Be sure to number the pages. Be sure to indicate the purpose of the research and the goals to be achieved.
Any research paper contains the introduction. It should comment on the choice of the topic, emphasizing the importance of these discoveries. Outline the further possible ways of using them.
The main part may consist of several components. You must provide the intermediate results of the study, describe the experiments or observations you conducted, and draw preliminary conclusions. In this part, you must reflect on the methods that you used to get results.
In the conclusion, you need to sum up your work, pointing out the results and outlining the necessary further actions in this direction. An obligatory element of a scientific paper is a list of used literature, i.e. sources.

Tip 5: How to conduct the research

In the study, it is very important to put forward a hypothesis, a scientific assumption. This concretizes the subject of the research. The hypothesis must be supported by logical considerations or data, it must be justified. During the research, this hypothesis must be tested, and consequently, found to be true or false. Next, you need to set the tasks of your research. Do not confuse tasks with goals. Goals show what we want to get. Tasks represent the necessary research processes, because the goal may not be achieved.

It is also very important to include the literature review in the paper. We summarize the known facts about the phenomenon under investigation and reveal the direction of our research. Having written the literature review, we will master the material and be able to give reasoned answers to the questions of listeners during the report.

We also need to describe the research methodology. As a speaker, we need to know in which specific areas this methodology can be applied and how stable it is.

Be sure to present your data. Mathematical studies are characterized using many formulas. So, these formulas do not need to be presented separately. We need to analyze all the data we use and put forward only the most important data as working data. The graphical form of working data presentation is the most descriptive one.

The received data should be compared with the data from the literature sources and analyzed for the establishment of a certain pattern, which will need to be described in the research paper. We finish the paper with the conclusions. They must correspond to the hypothesis and tasks of the study. In fact, that's it.