Writing an academic research paper

Writing an academic research paper

I have stressed the importance of a research questions since everything else involved with the writing of an academic paper follows from them. The rule is simple: it is only that which helps you answer your question that should be included in the paper, Estimated Reading Time: 8 mins How to write a research paper 1. Understand the assignment. Completing a research paper successfully means accomplishing the specific tasks set out 2. Choose a research paper topic. There are many ways to generate an idea for a research paper, from brainstorming with 3. Conduct preliminary  · The first thing when you start to write a research paper that your professor will ask for is a research proposal. This is supposed to give them an idea of the area that you’re interested in. Usually, at first, the proposal isn’t set in stone but more so a jumping-off blogger.comted Reading Time: 10 mins

How to Write a Research Paper | A Beginner's Guide

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Enter the email address you writing an academic research paper up with and we'll email you a reset link. Need an account? Click here to sign up. Download Free PDF. How to Write an Academic Paper Working-papers of the Dept of Political Science, Ibn Haldun University, Istanbul, Turkey, Erik Ringmar.

Download PDF Download Full PDF Package This paper. A short summary of this paper, writing an academic research paper. How to Write an Academic Paper. Istanbul, Turkey, November 16, Please refer to as above, but there is no copyright.

Feel free to use and spread as you like. People write many different kinds of things. What you write, and for which audience, will vary and the advice given to writers writing an academic research paper accordingly.

The pieces of advice that follow below refer to the kind of writing we do at the university. What concerns us is how to write essays, theses and academic papers. Or, slightly more pretentiously put, we are concerned with the question of how to do research. A paper for an undergraduate class is just the beginning, writing an academic research paper, and much of the advice below writing an academic research paper for that reason appear slightly overblown.

Come writing an academic research paper think of it, that is probably the case. At the same time, it is good to understand the process since it is the same for all kinds of research, from the very first term-paper to PhD dissertations and on to those seminal tomes which senior scientists produce in mid-career.

To write a thesis at a university is to enter a new and at first rather intimidating world. Previously, if you had a question, you would simply look up the answer on-line or search for it in a book. Yet as a writing an academic research paper your task is to transform yourself from a consumer of knowledge to a producer.

You will become an authority and your own source of information. To be an authority and a source of information is a great responsibility. It is a pretentious and perhaps slightly scary position to be in, writing an academic research paper, but it is also very exciting. If you have problems presenting yourself as an authority, you must begin by pretending.

After a while you will start to believe in your own hype, and before long you will be able to hold forth with authority on most issues.

Welcome to our world! There are of course many kinds of research and also many kinds of academic papers you can write. Researchers have different goals. To describe something sounds like a fairly easy task, but that depends of course on what you want to describe.

When Galileo Galilei in observed hitherto unobserved heavenly bodies through his telescope, the first and most obvious questions was what he had seen and how to describe it to others. This was clearly not that easy to do. But it is also possible to describe the already well-known in new ways — and that is not easy either.

Consider the task that Adam Smith set himself in The Wealth of Nations,where he presented the economic market as an independent system governed by its own laws.

No one had previously described the economy that way. The challenge was to convince others that they should look at the world in a new fashion. But most research concerns writing an academic research paper descriptions as much as explanations. Research is a question of understanding things that have not been understood before; of finding out why things are the way they are and work the way the do. Really good, really fascinating, research is organized like a detective story. In a book by Agatha Christie there is always a person found dead in the first chapter — often a young, scantily clad, woman on the floor or a library, writing an academic research paper.

Two questions present themselves immediately: who killed her and why? The rest of the book is then concerned with finding the murderer and the motive. Nothing else matters. Since we always know what detective stories are about, they are easy to read. Together with the detective you simply put the puzzle together.

Detective stories are also easy to write — Agatha Christie used to write two or three per year. A good academic paper should be like a detective story. In the first paragraph there should be a body in a library.

The reader, that is, should be introduced to something strange, something that needs to be explained, writing an academic research paper.

The rest of the paper should then provide the explanation. Nothing more, nothing less. In this way both the author and the reader are perfectly aware of what the paper is about, and the paper is writing an academic research paper when the question has been satisfactorily answered. There is thus a great difference between a research topic and a research question.

The world is full of topics and as human beings there are always a lot of things that interest us. But you cannot do research on a topic. Topics are too big; they never really start anywhere and they never really end anywhere either. One topic relates to other topics and writing about it we will before long end up with a gigantic topic-web where everything is dependent on everything else.

If you try to untangle this web you will become hopelessly confused and you will never be able to finish. There are pathetic examples of scholars who failed to understand this and who write volume after colume before they realize that their lives are too short to finish what they have started.

A question does not work that way. A question you pose and then you answer it. And when the question is answered, the research is done. This is why it is important to formulate the question well. A well-formulated question is a question that can be answered, and hopefully in an interesting way. A badly formulated question is a question that pretends to be a question but which actually only points to a topic. If you are a Ph. student this provides a great opportunity to save years of work, writing an academic research paper.

The better the question you are pursuing, the sooner you can finish your dissertation and get your life back. Unfortunately it is quite difficult to formulate good research questions. In many ways this is the most difficult part of your work — representing, perhaps, something like 50 percent of the overall effort.

I have written books where it has taken me years to understand what I actually wanted to know. You write and write and since the text grows longer you think you are making progress, but actually you have no idea where the whole thing is going.

After that the work proceeds quickly. It is easy to write once you know what you are doing. In that respect, writing an academic paper resembles giving a speech in front of an audience. If you have something to say, an hour can be short and it is easy and fun to talk. But if you have nothing to say, even two minutes can feel like an absolute eternity. For paper writers too it is essential to win and keep your audience. Compare the working conditions of a stand-up comic who only has a few seconds before the rotten tomatoes start to fly.

And once you have lost your audience, it is next to impossible to win it back. The audience for your academic paper is most likely your supervisor or examiner. Unfortunately, supervisors and examiners are human beings, and this means that they too are likely to have rather limited attention-spans.

Moreover, they often have a big pile of papers on their desks and only writing an academic research paper couple of hours to read and assess the whole thing. Often they make up their minds very quickly regarding what sort of a paper they are reading, perhaps after reading only a few pages.

Of course research should not be judged on such a flimsy basis, and maybe you are lucky and will find a supervisor or examiner who has more patience, but it is a mistake to trust this to be the case.

So why not make it easy for the reader? Make clear already in the introduction to the paper that you are worth listening to. Start by saying what you really have in mind. Put the best points first and use the rest of the paper to explain, deepen and clarify your argument.

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Make sure the paper is read by at least one or two colleagues who is not familiar with the specific work. Provide a cover letter to the editor along with a brief paragraph highlighting the importance of this work and names of possible reviewers. Have all coauthors approve the finalized version of the paperFile Size: KB How to write a research paper 1. Understand the assignment. Completing a research paper successfully means accomplishing the specific tasks set out 2. Choose a research paper topic. There are many ways to generate an idea for a research paper, from brainstorming with 3. Conduct preliminary I have stressed the importance of a research questions since everything else involved with the writing of an academic paper follows from them. The rule is simple: it is only that which helps you answer your question that should be included in the paper, Estimated Reading Time: 8 mins