How to Write a Research Paper Step by Step

Making a research project is not an easy task. Some students consider it as a burden, simply because it takes so much work, brainstorming and rigorous study. For them, research is hassle. It brings never-ending challenges.

I cannot argue with how students react about research works because I felt the same way too when I first encountered research papers. At first it was really tiring and unappealing class activity. It brought me some sort of anxiety and stress. I was really worried that time, really afraid of what comes out next or what problems may come as the study continues. But days passed by, researching was filled with fun and excitement. I learned so many things regarding my topic. It widened my understanding, and enhance my abilities as a student. I came into realization that researching is not about hassle task, but it is a great opportunity for students to grow in their chosen fields and to develop their analytical skills.

Allow me to share to you these simple steps in creating a good research project. It will help you create a more valuable term paper.

The first thing to do is to create the main research idea. In other words, you must think about the main topic of your study. Consider choosing a clear and focused topic. To do this, start with the developing of your research questions. These are concise and arguable questions around which you center your study or research. Research questions are important because it help the proponents or writers to focus on specific topics, not on general and broad ones. A good research paper should have be focused on one main topic. This part will also establish the boundary or limitations of your study.

Sample research questions:

How Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology improves the library management system?

In what ways is brain development affected by experience?

You already have the topic to work with. It is now the right time to think of ways on how to make your study successful. This is the planning stage or the framework of the whole study. A research design is the plan of attack for the research that includes deciding on where to conduct the study and how the behavior of interest is to be measured. If you are planning to conduct study about the application of RFID technology in library systems, the best place for you would be the academic library. It is in this place that you can conduct your study. You must also consider some important factors and variables during the experimentation. This will make sure that your study will produce reliable data and results.

Deciding the type of subjects, how to obtain and handle them with consideration on ethical manner is really important. Ask yourself on this: who will be concerned or affected with my study? Or how should I gather the facts/statistics about people involved with my study?

This will summarize your studies as much as data and observations are concerned. Know what to observe first before making conclusions. Observing about the phenomena you are concerned about is essential because it can yield to new discoveries or verification of established laws/theorems. Finding out appropriate measuring techniques you can apply to your study is important for you to be able to quantify and ensure the accuracy of the results.

This is the most critical part of the research process. All the previous steps are made just to make the experimentation part well-organized and systematic. The researchers must be very keen to observe, measure, and record data formally. They must be very attentive with what they do and they must record the results accurately. The research design, as planned should be followed while conducting the study in order to get precise and reliable data.

You now have the data after doing the experiments necessary to your research. The next question is: what would you do with the data? The simple answer: analyze them! Observe the data and results and consider the behavior of the data. How the variable varies with some other factors in the experiment? How are these variables related? These are few sample questions you might want to answer while analyzing the results. You must summarize and analyze the collected data.

After analyzing the data, researchers must be able report their research findings. They must summarize their observed facts and evaluations in a way that they can be easily understood by others. Relationships about variables and other factors of the study are best understood by using graphs such as histograms, bar graphs and pie charts. This stage will also include the paper works or full documentation of the research.

The finished project may raise more questions and can serve as basis for a new study. You must cite some possible future works based on the results of your research. For example, you found out that RFID technology is effective in improving the services of academic library. You possibly say that RFID can also be applied to business more particularly on logistics cause it can make the inventory faster (based on your findings when books in the library are easily monitored and counted with the use of RFID technology). Hence, you suggest the future researchers to work on a new topic based on your studies.