Writing research papers

Writing a research paper takes a lot of time and effort. It demands a thorough knowledge not only of the subject you are writing about, but also of the strategies for generating, verifying, substantiating and providing ideas. It is necessary to follow the structure, style, format and layout of the paper. In the last two units you will see how to do it.

Gathering data, writing summary notes and organizing ideas

When you read papers written by other authors on the subject you are interested in, you must write summary notes. There are 2 kinds of summary notes.

A summary condenses into a brief note the key ideas of a source. It is a concise description of the material without concern for details.

A précis is a polished summary that in a few words expresses the key ideas of an entire paragraph, section, or chapter. To produce a précis, condense the original piece of writing, reducing a paragraph into a sentence, an article into a brief paragraph, a book into a page.

Papers in sociology as well as in other scientific disciplines have a similar organization pattern – Introduction, Body (Method, Results, Discussion) and Conclusion.

When you write a research paper follow the instructions:

Introduction: identify the subject of your research and narrow it to a specific topic, provide background information, state the problem and the hypothesis of research, provide theoretical basics of the study, formulate the thesis statement.

Method: describe the subjects/ participants of your study, the apparatus and equipment used, the procedure followed.

Results: report on your findings, support them with statistical data, diagrams, tables, etc., note whether your findings are consistent with the advanced hypothesis.

Discussion: evaluate and interpret the results obtained, make inferences from the results, discuss the implications of your findings.

Conclusion: end your paper with some reflections about the topic discussed, some suggestions for further research.

Task: Have you ever written summary notes? If yes, when was it? What kind of notes did you choose?

When you start writing a paper, will you follow the instructions given above? Have you consulted you thesis supervisor on this issue?

Write a paper devoted to your scientific research.

List of phrases used in writing

• … is an important and common problem.

• The paper examines …

• Accordingly we suggest that …

• Several techniques have been used to investigate …

• There is a wide body of literature which suggests that …

• There were the limited number of studies conducted on …

• Examples are given in …

• It is therefore important to establish the …

• Studies on the … have been and still are of interest because of the …

• There is still lack of knowledge of … . much further research is needed to understand …

• We still know little about …

• The results indicated that …

• The data cover a wide range of …

• We can make several observations.

• In general, …

• On the basis of these results it can be observed that …

• Finally, an important conclusion follows from …

• It would be interesting to …

• Much further research is needed in the area of …