Writing great research papers

“ Research is to see what everybody else has seen, and to think what nobody else has thought. ” - Albert Szent-Gyorgyi Pre...

“Research is to see what everybody else has seen, and to think what nobody else has thought.” -Albert Szent-Gyorgyi

Prepare your desk

Prepare yourself before you start. Before you start writing your paper or you start reading other academic papers or books you need to find some good tools to manage everything properly from your drafts to your readings, from your references to citations and bibliography. You can use some of the great tools available online and most of them are at no cost. These tools will help you at every step of your research. It is highly recommended that you use these tools as they will improve your productivity to a lot extent. Read our blog post dedicated only on this part or visit our website for complete list.

Some of the most notable research tools are:

Mendeley

For reading and managing

Mendeley is a free reference manager which helps you to organize your research.

Features:

•  Automatically generate bibliographies

•  Easily import papers from other research software (your own library)

•  Find relevant papers based on what you’re reading

Your own virtual libraries are very important while writing your thesis or paper. It’s very difficult to write a research paper without such bibliographic tools.

Google drive

For writing

Google Drive provides a powerful online drive for researchers and is free. Multiple researchers can collaborate online and simultaneously access a document with multiple cursors. It is considered one of the most famous tool among researchers working on common documents.

Producteev

For dividing work

This is a great free service which coordinates tasks within teams of researchers. Producteev is simple, powerful and so much more than an online to-do list. It's helped hundreds of thousands of teams work faster with better results.

Find more tools here on finding resources and papers, visualization, connecting with experts, crowdfunding, maintaining repositories, working with data, peer-review and others.

Selecting subject and topic

Choose a topic that challenges and interests you the best, your zeal of writing paper depends on this. It is recommended that you first define your time limit, target audience and if you can find resources you want for same. It is always easier to shortlist the topics you are already aware of. Getting resources is one of the most important thing. Get in a discussion with your co-authors for same and research guides, this helps the most. Choose topic carefully as it the crux of your research paper and it says about the subject. You need to narrow down your topic not make it final at first step. Select some good keywords that may define your paper title.

Get clarity with state of purpose and paper statements

It is important for you to define your purpose of research properly. It has been seen that many researchers started writing their research on a topic and deviated from it by the time they reached end. Jot down your viewpoints, your observations, etc. A thesis statement must not be a fact or an opinion that cannot be proved. Your paper statement must not be a question but an answer and must not contain words like “I believe”. It must not be vague or written in irrelevant language.

Create outline

Before you start writing your paper create an outline of paper. These are heading and 2-3 lines summaries of what you want to write in that section. It’ll help you to make structure of your paper and what all the readings you have to write. You can include introduction, few body sections with their sub-sections and conclusion. Imagine this as an index page of a book.

Talk to experts

It is crucial that you keep your research guide in constant loop. A research guide is generally an expert in the subject who can guide you the best. Also, you can find some great researchers and can talk to them online. Ask for best readings and resources that can help you with your paper. Send drafts to some experts and ask for comments and later work on them, you can call this partial peer-review. You should visit nearby conferences if happening on the same subject, you’ll get to meet experts in your subject.

You can find some great websites here to connect to experts.

Your first draft

Try your best to stick to paper guidelines from publishers in terms of structure not format. Organizations like London Journals Press takes care of formatting themselves, you can submit paper in any format. Identify 3-4 important findings from observations, experiments and reading and try to make it the paramount theme of the paper. It is after this draft you start working literature. Your title must be simple and accurately depict your findings. Avoid use of jargons known to very few people and words like Investigation, Study, Novel, Facile, etc. Remember, your abstract is one of the most crucial part of your paper, first few lines should focus on what the research is about. Add major conclusions in a style that a general readership can read and understand what the whole paper is about (avoid in-depth reports, experiments and data.) Keep it short and effective. In introduction of paper, start by explaining general background of the readings. Include few paragraphs that discuss previous work and focus on issues that are inferred in the current research. When it comes to conclusion and results, clearly describe how your research compare or contrast with previous results. Add all major results followed by telling a scope of future

perspectives or application of this research, even to other disciplines. Readers will know if you just used paper abstract and changed the language, so do not do that.

Images, graphs and tables

Most of the authors do not focus on this but this point is a great differentiator of a great paper from an average paper. It is highly recommended to use high quality images (300 dpi images), this impacts a lot in both online journal and print version of your paper. Readers and reviewers do not like blurry images or bad aspect ratio images. Always keep the aspect ratio of image perfect. For graphs and tables, first ask your publisher for fonts (you can download London Journals Press fonts from here). If the fonts used in graphs are same as your final published paper, it will have a great look on readers. Avoid excessive presentation of data and result without any discussion in section that introduced that image, graph or table.

Your final draft

Your final draft must include citations and bibliography. It must comply with structure standards of publisher. Add paper title, abstract, all authors name, keywords, authors emails, addresses and universities. The bibliography is simply a list of your readings sources; how it is arranged depends again on the formatting style of publisher. Proofread final paper carefully for spelling, punctuation, missing or duplicated words. Before handing in your paper, be sure to proofread it for any mechanical errors.

Understanding reviews prospective

Authors must understand that reviewers thinks best scenario for publishing organization standards and authors. They want the best from authors. An author must evaluate his own research paper in unbiased nature and think like a reviewer. If your paper is rejected you must not be demotivated but try to understand the reviews comments and work on the same.