Table of Contents
Writing a Research Paper: What Does It Consist Of?
A standard research paper has nine sections. These are title page, introduction, literature review, methodology, data analysis, results, discussion, conclusion and reference page. There may be some additional sections such as sampling, diagrams, and photographs to supplement your research material. It depends upon the instructions given by your guide or instructor. It is always wise to examine some research paper sections written by others and get familiarity with the structuring and formatting. Thereafter, you should try to mould your ideas in their way of presentation. Coming to the generalized nine sections of any research papers, these can be elaborated as under:
1. Title Page
This is the front cover of your research paper section called the title page. It contains research title, information about your institution, your name with roll no. and any other information that your instructor might have prescribed. Some teachers like ornamental presentation of the cover title page, some other like it to be very simple.
2. Introduction
You have to give a brief description of background of the research paper section. You shall include reasons of coming across the problem under research and probable solutions that you would be suggesting. The introduction is a brief summary of the purpose and objective of your research paper section. You may call it an overview.
3. Literature Review
This section shall provide details of the previous work. The summary and description of the work or contributions of other authors should be brief. Your research material must be from some credible source namely journals, books, and periodicals of repute. All materials that you would be using must be relevant to your topic of research and should be able to complement your thesis. Such literature review contains title of the work, name of the author(s) and publication year.
4. Methodology
Methodology section shall describe the outlay of your research paper providing methods that you would be applying in your research. This may include experiments carried out in laboratory, statistical data with mathematical calculations or computation and a comparison with existing literature.
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5. Data Analysis
Data analysis section is where you analyze your data obtained from various operational methodology outlined earlier. The instruments used or data analysis and operation shall depend upon the type of the research paper. SWOT (Strength, Weakness, Opportunity and Threat) analysis is one method of data analysis. TQA (Total quality analysis) is another.
6. Results
Actual results obtained shall be presented in this section. These results have been obtained from various data analysis.
7. Discussion
Here, you shall discus results obtained and its implication on various other fields. You may indicate possible improvements to further build up your research work. This section gives you opportunity to present significance of your research study and the way it shall make contribution to other fields.
8. Conclusion
You restate your thesis with stress upon ways and means that you adopted to reach at a conclusion. You should give a brief outlay of various others sections such as data analysis, methodology and results etc.
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9. Reference Page
Here you list out all the scholarly materials used as information in the research paper. You should use a style prescribed by your teacher or guide such as APA, MLA, Chicago, Turbian or Harvard etc. Of course, you had not forgotten to cite every source and information in the earlier sections of your research paper.