At some time in your academic career your tutor may require you to write a research paper, this may be a theoretical paper, i.e. looking at people's ideas or examining poetry or literature; or it may be a research paper on some empirical research you have taken, or even some scientific research.
What you're required to write and how you structure it will depend, to a great extent, on the sort of research paper you are writing. This article provides some ideas of how to structure a research paper that is based on some empirical research (interviews, surveys, etc) that you might take.
An empirical research project requires a proposal, laying out the methods you're going to use and the questions you're trying to answer in your research project. Once you have done the research you will need to write a report or paper on how the research went and what you found. Most research papers are structured in the following way:
Introduction
A brief introduction and background of the research, why you chose the project you did and whether you felt you were successful or not in the aims that you had for the research.
Literature Review
A literature review is a summary, presented in the form of a structured argument, of some of the work that has already been done in the area you have researched, e.g., Why are women still treated differently than men in the workplace?
Projects concerning woman's work will usually involve some of the feminist and sociological literature on women in the work place. You will also need some information on what is known as patriarchy, a system that prefers men over women and places women under men in the social arena. Once you have completed the literature review you will have a brief section of methodology and methods.
Methodology and Methods
Methodology is the theory of research and will involve talking about the approach you took. Methods are the methods you used to gain the information that's contained in the findings section of the research. In the above example your methodology might be a feminist methodology, i.e., a methodology that looks specifically at the experiences of women rather than men. Most feminist research is qualitative rather than quantitative so your full approach would be a feminist, qualitative inquiry.
Methods
When you write about methods you should talk about the types of questions in the questionnaire or topic areas for the interview. You should say how you found your research participants and what made you choose them over some other people.
Ethics
This should simply say that participants were advised that all their details were confidential and that the responses were anonymous. The research was taken in accordance with the ethical requirements of your institution
Findings
This section should give some examples of the responses you got in your interview questions and any bar or pie charts that you may have run from your questionnaire responses. You should comment on the findings, but not too much as this should be in the discussion section.
Discussion and Analysis
Here you would discuss your findings and perhaps draw in some of the literature to explain or highlight points you think are important.
Conclusion
This should bring the paper to a close and refer to anything that you feel you might do differently if were you to take on another project.
