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The Writing Process - Step by Step

Getting Started

Writing research papers is an important part of your college learning experience, training you to research and write effectively. However, if you don't know how to start, writing a research paper can be a daunting task. Don't worry! We will guide you through the process. The sections in this step-by-step guide allow you to learn at your own pace. Revisit the information as much as you need. Let's get started!

 

What Is a Research Paper?

A research paper is an expanded essay that presents your investigation and argument on a focused topic based on the information you gathered. It demonstrates not only your understanding of available information from experts in the area of your research, but also your evaluation and insight on the subject matter through an orderly and logical presentation of your argument.

What Are the Qualities of a Good Research Paper?

Make sure you know the requirements of your specific assignment. But in general, a good research paper will have the following qualities:

  • A strong and focused thesis statement
  • Logically organized arguments and main points
  • Each main point is supported by persuasive facts and examples
  • Opposing viewpoints are included and rebutted, showing why the author's argument is more valid
  • The paper shows the author's understanding of the topic and the material being used
  • The work is original, not plagiarized 
  • Every source is correctly documented and credited in a recognized citation style
  • The paper is written in clear language in a style suitable for college research

Thanks to Butte College

Six Steps to Research

Think of Research as a Six Step process:

1. Break down your keywords. Go back to the question and make sure you've found your keywords (revisit the Words Words Words box in Step 1 of the Writing Process). Remember, a keyword will be a concrete concept - the "meat" in the sandwich. For a phrase like "Discuss the economic impact of divorce on families" the words divorce and families are concrete concepts, and you will need to search for economic, but you can't search for impact - it would be meaningless.

2. Find synonyms, variations and related concepts for your keywords. You may have different spellings (pediatric OR paediatric), (behavior OR behaviour). You may have synonymous words or phrases (tumour OR neoplasm), (heartburn OR "gastric reflux"). You should use tools like Credo, dictionaries, thesauri - or even Wikipedia - to help you find more words (and don't forget to ask other people for ideas). You will combine these with an "OR" (see the section on Search Strategy, below).

3. Look for options for truncation and phrase searching. The English language puts a lot of grammatical information at the end of words. You can often truncate (shorten) the word at the point where it changes and put a symbol (usually an *, but sometimes another symbol like a $ or ?) to say "find everything that starts with this" (e.g. scrub* will find scrubs, scrubbed, scrubbing, etc). Truncation can get you a wider range of results. If you have words that belong together as a phrase, you can wrap them in "quotation marks" to tell the search tool to look for them side-by-side (e.g. "public health" or "constraint induced movement therapy"). Phrase searching will get you more on-topic results. Please note you usually can't use truncation and phrase searching at the same time.

4. Work out what your limits are. Are you only looking for research from the past five years? Or are you only interesting in results about children, or humans (no animal studies)? Maybe you only want results from Australia? Perhaps you only want to find a particular type of article (like a randomised controlled trial)? Work out what the scope of your search needs to be.

5. Put together a search strategy. Remember, you are working with computers. Use operators such as AND, OR and NOT, as well as your truncation marks and phrase searching, to create a "sum" that the search tool can use to calculate what results to show you. You'll find more information about that on the Working with Keywords page.

6. Look at the results you have and make changes to your search. You won't find everything with one perfect search strategy (it doesn't exist), so you may have to change your search several times - or break it up into chunks. Do your search, think about it, do another search. See what you find using different search strategies and keywords, and using different databases.

Thanks to James Cook University