Another important element of academic communication is a research paper, in which you discuss your findings on a certain subject. It is a guided way of communicating your findings, reasoning, and study to the academic world.
The first step in writing a research paper in a journal is to select a topic and conduct research to identify a Research gap or Research problem. Develop a brief thesis and outline and write a draft that follows the standard IMRaD (Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion) format, ensuring that all of the findings are in a comprehensible format. Select your preferred publication and only submit it after checking and verifying the formatting and author guidelines of the journal and revising and proofreading your essay to ensure originality and accuracy.
The process may look cumbersome, but it is made easier by following a step process approach.
Phase I – Planning and Preparation
After selecting your topic and defining your hypothesis, the most important thing to do is to get absorbed into the existing body of work. Make sure your background is strong by effort to ensure you are not searching very far back but using peer-reviewed and recent articles and finding useful sources in academic collection databases (ex: Google Scholar, Pubmed, and JSTOR). You should be taking notes as you read, to record important findings, critically evaluate every source, and point out gaps or contradictions that your paper can help resolve. The most important thing is to maintain a close record of the sources, authors, dates of publication, and journal titles, to make the citation process easier in the future.
As you have collected research, create an outline that acts as the guide to your paper. This includes planning your points in a logical manner with headings and subheadings and mapping out where you will fit your supporting points so that you have a coherent and well-structured final paper.
Phase II – Writing the Manuscript
Writing the manuscript is the second stage of the research process and it starts with writing an effective Title. It must be clear, descriptive and informative, representing and reflecting on the contents of your paper sufficiently, without the use of jargon and abbreviations that not everybody in your profession would know.
Then you will draft the Abstract, which will be a separate summary of your research as a whole. This is a concise summary of the research (usually less than 250 words) that summarizes the background, the purpose of the research, methods, main findings and conclusions so that the reader and editors understand the relevance of the research within a short time.
Introduction serves to introduce the scene, placing within it the larger context, encompassing the stated purpose of the particular research or knowledge deficiency, succinctly presenting your hypothesis, and briefly describing your method.
The Methods section, which is sometimes called Materials and Methods, is where you become sufficiently descriptive so that someone can replicate your study. This part is written in the past tense starting with all the materials and equipments used, references any ethical issues (i.e. approval of institutional review board) and any statistical approach to analyze the data.
After this, your Results section is presented in a logical, objective and clear sequence. You need to include figures, tables and graphs to show your data in such a way that it is very easy to grasp and refer to it in the body of text. Here it is important to avoid interpretations and discussions of the data.
You interpret your results in the Discussion, which is how you explain your results and how they are relevant to your original research questions. You will need to compare your results with the literature that is available and recognize how your results either agree or disagree with what has been published before. It is also here that you can state the limitations of your study and recommend future research.
The Conclusion will then conclude with a summary of the key findings and the importance and impact of your work on the field. Lastly, you should also carefully format your References and Citations, and make sure that they are written in the style of the journal so that no source mentioned in the body has a half baked or incomplete entry.
Phase III – Revision and Submission
The last step in the research process is everything to do with polishing your manuscript and making it ready to publish. Start with a careful final editing and proofread, verifying that everything is right and that your reasoning makes sense and transitions are clear.
Another point of view is priceless in this case, and that is why you can take a break or have your colleague to look at what you have done. Then, you should follow the rules of formatting. Pay close attention to the journal guide to authors to ensure that you have the appropriate prescriptions on word count, heading style, and font.
Write them according to the requirements of the journal, because the publication might not take data sets or figures, other than that of the journal. After formatting your work, you will write a cover letter and send it. The letter to the editor should also include a short outline of your study and why it is important and suitable to be published in the journal.
Finally, once it is submitted, be ready to go through the peer-review process. You get to be assessed by professionals in your area and in case of revision you have to take care of all the reviewer comments in a professional manner in response letter.
