Your research paper is not an easy task to tackle. Here, you need to do quite a lot of work to prepare for writing it. Sometimes this amount of work looks like too much, and you end up getting lost in the details and can't deliver a quality paper, but if you follow our professional writing tips, you'll finish everything with success.
Looking for the research question that you like and actually want to explore is hard. Finding a question that is both interesting and has scientific actuality is like mission impossible for most people. However, you can handle it with enough effort, some writing tips, and a good Internet connection. Allow us to introduce you into the world of amazing tips and tricks that work!
Different majors would have different scopes of main research. It goes from the history of the American revolution to differences in cell walls in big and small organisms. Don't eliminate the ideas that seem dull or irrelevant just yet, those may lead to interesting results later on! Brainstorming the topic with a couple of friends may prove fruitful. The discussion where many minds can offer their ideas is always better than listening to yourself.
Now, make each general idea narrower. If you look at most research papers, they do not make a great deal of work: for most cases, this is only a fraction of a much bigger topic. Yours should be like that too.
This is what you should focus on when making the ideas more precise:
You may come across the limitations of the study. For instance, you probably don't have the money to send a survey to 3,000 people. Use common sense to avoid them like reducing the group down to 30.
Once you have a mind map or outline of your topics, pick the ones you like the most and research them. Don't spend more than 3 hours on each. Your goal here is to find out the following.
If you find that it's either not interesting for the scientific community or was already answered multiple times, look into the next question.
Once you have decided on the research question, it's time to get your hands dirty and dig into the research. There are lots of places to find sources in. Scientific journals in your university's accounts are the most useful. Sometimes, you only see a part of source for free, while most colleges allow you to access the whole thing.
You have to study everything that was already said on a certain issue to form an unbiased opinion. Consider all the major and minor points and look for the implications. Browse through some defining works and then get down to smaller publications and search for finer details that would round up the topic. Once you have some knowledge on the topic, form ideas and look for research that would support them.
Have you noticed that you spend most of the time on sorting out notes? You end up having them on multiple media, some even without the references - this is chaos, not scientific work. Many of the tips on the Internet leave sorting out your notes for the last stage. We believe that it should be done from the beginning.
When you are taking notes, make sure:
When you're done with the preliminary work, start writing the first draft. It's really hard to start, but you have to get on with it anyways. It's all about the time: it'll take a lot of it to edit the paper, and you don't want to run out of it before the deadline.
Start with the formatting. You may not believe that the left margin or the line spacing are important, but that's what the prof wants from you. Study the guidelines and create a document that follows them - you'd be better off doing it at the beginning because changing the whole document after you're done is too much of hassle.
Now, you have to create a powerful outline for your work. You need it to structure an essay and to get the idea of how you are going to build the logical ties within the text.
A thesis is a part that describes the whole purpose and the major point of the paper. It is the entirety of your research, boiled down to a small and understandable statement. You don't have to include argumentation or facts into your thesis, the description of what your work is all about will be enough. When it comes to the research paper introduction, you can paraphrase the thesis with a couple of small additions. Here's what it should include:
Writing the main body of your paper is a difficult process. Since most institutions demand it to be quite large, you have to produce up to 50 pages of written text. Make many breaks and don't tire yourself. You can't work all night long and end up with a nicely-written text.
Write with style in mind:
Then comes the dull part - annotation, the most boring and tedious task if you don't do it the proper way. We recommend writing with annotations already in place. The general advice here is to do them in APA style even if that isn't what your teacher requires from you. The thing is, if you have to put in-text citations as a numbered list, you stand a chance of mixing it all up. Did you ever have to adjust your paper after you finish it? Having to change every citation in the text is just insufferable work, and you have to avoid it at all cost. Place the annotations so that you can trace them later on, and your work will come out perfect.
Every piece of writing needs editing to become an A-grade scientific paper - there are two steps here, and both of them bring you more benefits if done with a partner. During the first stage, you only look at the following things:
When you're positive that you don't have anything else to add or edit, it's time for proofreading. Here, you only have to correct your spelling, grammar, and other minor details. You can do this last stage of research paper work relaxed - you almost made it! Now you only have to submit it. Good luck!
