Find The Best Structure For Your Research Paper

To write a research paper, you need to be mentally prepared that it’s going to require a lot of time and effort on your part. Firstly you will need a lot of material on a bunch of topics. One of the most important things that most people overlook is the research paper structure. To be honest, it may seem a daunting task; however, if you make up your mind for sure, you can get done with it in no time as long as you manage to organize yourself. 

Before we actually dive into it, we need to go over a couple of other important details that may aid you in writing your research paper and without our help, you might get stuck in a rut or, worse, end up having writer’s block. A research paper outline can become quite a headache but it must also be written in a manner that is easily understandable. So, in order to avoid such hiccups, we would suggest you follow our simple guidance; you’ll write a research paper that will surely pack a punch and might just manage to impress your supervisor. 

Now, follow closely because this piece might change your mind regarding how you write any research paper. 

Gather the Weapons

Once you’ve decided upon a topic, you need to do extensive research on it. The process can be vice versa. You can research first and decide on a topic later on. But only these two steps can be intermingled. For the research, you may start with books. However, if you’re not into flipping hundreds of pages to find the relevant content, try looking up ‘research papers examples’ to get a rough idea. You can also lookup ‘research paper essay example’ and you may find one relevant to your domain. This will allow you not only to get an idea about how to structure your research paper but also learn a thing or two from the existing research papers for your discussion part. 

Writing the Best Structure for your Research Paper

When you have all the potential material at hand, you are all set to write your research paper. If you’ve studied other research papers, you will know how many parts are deemed necessary for your own research paper. However, if you’re at a standstill, don’t worry. Let us revise them for you. A research paper, in general, consists of an Abstract, Introduction, Methodology, Discussion and Conclusion(s). Now, you may be researching on a topic or a product; either way, these are the headings that are a must for any college research paper. Pick any random sample research paper and you can see for yourself most of these headings would be available there. 

An abstract gives an overview regarding the things you’ve discussed in your paper. This gives the reader an idea regarding what your paper is all about and what they can expect from it. Your abstract needs to be short and precise because if it’s long, it’ll feel too mundane. You have to make sure that you allure the reader into reading your entire paper and for that, you have to leave a margin of wonderment so that they’re compelled to read your paper to get to the bottom of it.

We will tell you how to pose your introduction in a while. But first, let’s have a look at the other sections. The methodology section is about discussing the experimentations or to describe the work processes you went through to develop the product. The steps that were taken and the difficulties you encountered while dealing with the issues, and how you overcome them using which tools specifically. For instance, you’re doing a study on Machine Learning and hence, training a model. In order to do that, you’ll talk about the dataset you’ve used and how you acquired it. 

After methodology, you’ve got the section for Discussions. Now, this section can be placed before Conclusion or after it depends upon the nature of your study. If you’d like to discuss your conclusions, you may place them afterwards. However, if your conclusions are drawn after a discussion of observations from the methodology processes, then you may place it before. Hence, the reader will have a fairly good idea of how you carried the project forward.

For the Conclusion section, you may present the results or the outcome of your entire research paper. Whether the question you posed at the starting was answered or the problem was provided with a solution through your product, you can mention everything related to it over here. You may very well have more than one outcome from your research, so make sure you write down everything, whether big or small. You never know what can be impactful.

Prepare for Battle

In terms of tackling the introduction part, this heading might seem a bit of an overdo but any research paper definition describes the opening of a research paper or even research paper assignment to be overzealous. A research paper introduction needs to be attention-grabbing. If your opening is not intriguing, your audience will lose interest and you would not want that to happen in the first half of the match because you need to let your audience know that your topic as of now is the most important thing and they should drop every single thing and solely focus all their attention on your research paper. After all, it’s practically going to consist of your blood and sweat. Figuratively or literally. Depends on how you look at it. 

Make sure you vehemently stress the title of your research paper. Start with some background information, a statistic or an incident that can shed light on your topic a bit. State the results, what has happened, what could’ve happened and what measures could’ve been taken to avoid any such incidents in the future or how the collateral damage could be lessened, so on forth. End your introduction by giving a brief overview of how you’re going to resolve the issue.

Types of Research Paper

After going through the sample research papers, you must’ve realised there’s not just one way to write a research paper. Oftentimes, each research paper is structured differently. It might be tailored as per the writer to map out everything, or it might be written as per a reader’s convenience. Either way, you need to pick out which one will be the best for your very own research paper. Given its domain, there may be an existing template that you can use to write your own paper. Let’s have a look at the types of research papers there are:

Analytical

These research papers deal with giving an in-depth analysation of certain facts, incidents, issues etc. These research papers propose multiple point-of-views, analyse each point in detail by talking about all the perspectives they entail, followed by a conclusive result from the aforementioned points. The different point-of-views can be a contribution of various other researchers and their papers. One thing to keep in mind in such a research paper is that to make sure not to favour one point in particular. This way, a reader gets to learn about multiple aspects of a single topic through your research paper.

Argumentative

An argumentative research paper talks about two different views and highlights the advantages and disadvantages of both. The idea is to sift through both views to reach a conclusion that gives an upper hand. The concept is very similar to that of a debate. The winner takes the prize, which in this case will be the reader.
One thing to note is that whichever point of view you agree with, you have to convince the reader that yours is the point that matters. 

Cause and Effect Research Papers

These are usually scenario-based papers. It might be easy to confuse them with the type of argumentative research papers. However, the two differ from one another quite much. With the cause and effect research papers, one would describe a situation. Discuss the cause and effect of the mentioned scenario and draw a concrete conclusion from all of it. These types of research papers are assigned to newbies to get them to understand and grasp how to write a research paper.

Experimental

These research papers include practical work in order for you to write such papers. Because you’d be writing a first-hand experience of the experiment you just conducted and what your findings were. It’d also include theories from other relevant researchers and how yours may differ from them. Such types of papers are written mostly in the field of science. Often dissertation writers get stuck on scientific topics unless they possess past experience, in which case writing the paper seems like a piece of cake for them.

Problem-Solution

As the name suggests, these kinds of papers are similar to the scenario-based ones as they issue a problem and you have to devise a solution for it. Not just devise, but also defend your solution. You can present and analyse your view and why you think it’ll be the most appropriate and adaptable solution. Furthermore, to make your solution more concrete, you may present facts and figures that support your argument. What do you know? If your solution is feasible enough, it just might be implemented? Such discoveries are seldom but have happened in the past.  

Report

This kind of research paper can be a type of informative essay. You conduct research on a given topic, highlight all the characteristics and then proceed to give an overall run-down about them at the end. The aim of this paper is to disperse information. So you need to present only the facts; otherwise, you can be misleading your audience. You also need to avoid sharing your own thoughts and opinions on the subject. These research reports follow a format similar to that of a business document or a memorandum. They are also used to write case studies for incidents or events. 

Survey 

For this kind of research paper, the writer has to conduct a survey from participants who are willing to answer the questions being asked. Once all the data has been collected, it is gathered and studied. Graphs are drawn up for precise mapping of opinions of the different people. Based on the findings, a conclusion is reached and then reported. These kinds of reports are usually carried out in psychological studies or even in businesses where the companies would like to get feedback from employees. The questionnaire can be prepared by the relevant authorities. 

Cite it right

Often, you’re going to find yourself at wit’s end and that’s when you desperately need some sort of inspiration and what better source of inspiration than the expansive Google Engine. Key in the right words and you’re going to hit the jackpot! On a more practical note, though, once you find the relevant source material, make sure you cite it correctly. The more references in correct format you add, the more points you might gain in the eye of your supervisor. As they’re going to know that you went through this much material to write one research paper and that is likely to build up your credibility. However, you may resort to a paper writing service if you’d like but that won’t render you the satisfaction of doing it all by yourself. 

Tips for an amazing structure for a research paper

In order to make sure that your research paper structure is on the point you’ll have to put in extra effort to hit the nail on the coffin. Ensure that you’ve followed all of the above steps. Not only have that, if you feel like you need practice, ask your supervisor if you can submit a proposal first. They can review it and you’ll know what needs tweaking. Lastly, you can always hire a custom essays writer to get the most out of this research paper as long as it’s worth your money.