The Most Overlooked Bits Of A Research Paper

Writing is generally an important skill to master especially when you are still at the lower educational levels. Writing a research paper is not as easy as it may seem. We know that most students have to write at least one research paper before they graduate. But what exactly do we mean by research papers?

Research papers are a form of writing assignment that requires thorough investigation on a given topic and writes a research report about your findings. This kind of assignment assumes a lengthy structure and its parts include an abstract, introduction, methodology section, results, discussion, conclusion, and reference for all cited works. 

Research papers are usually subjected to specific style guides and might require to be formatted appropriately. To be safe, you should fully understand the instructions provided and seek clarification from your instructor beforehand on any unclear section. All research papers demand to be approached from a literature review perspective. Therefore, there is a need to strive and find an interesting angle while featuring someone else’s work.

Many lenient instructors often provide their students with prompts to build on. By now we assume that you are familiar with the important steps to follow in writing an effective research paper. Despite knowing this, there are key things that most students tend to overlook when writing their final drafts. This is our main area of focus in this article. 

We all know the important role that is played by a well-written and comprehensive introduction section. Being the first part of your research paper, the introduction section is always designed to hook your readers’ interests and lure them into reading the rest of your paper.

It is quite apparent that a good introduction should contain three distinct parts yet many students tend to either ignore or just overlook them. These three parts include:

The general presentation

This section should always contain an interesting fact as to why your research problem has not been solved yet or just highlight the main merits of your research. There can be many reasons to give out ranging from experimental errors due to sampling size issues and/or novelty of the subject. Many students and researchers often forget to elaborate on the reasons why their research is urgent for solving the stated problem.

Your purpose for the paper

Your purpose could match well with the general statement of interest or your thesis statement. However, many tend to interchange the thesis statement with hypotheses and research problems. The only mistake that most students do is that they always include this as the last statement in their introductions. This is a growing concern and is continually overlooked.

Your statement of intent

This is the most overlooked part of most students’ paper submissions. They often tend to assume that readers will automatically know the overall overview of the research paper because they have done lots and lots of literature review. This shouldn’t be the case. You should always try to include a sentence-long statement as to why you choose this particular problem and/or show the significance of the research.