Writing a Research Paper

Writing a research paper is not much different from writing an essay. You will take what you have already learned about writing an essay and apply the same principles to your research paper. You will still have an introduction, body, and conclusion. You will still have a thesis in your paper that you will prove in the body of your paper. You will still give credit to outside sources you use to support your opinions.

So what is the difference between writing an essay and writing a research paper? For one, you can explore your topic in much greater depth than you can in a traditional essay. You can become an expert in one specific topic and share your findings and enlighten your readers.

You may find that you retain more information from a research project than you do from other assessment methods, and that the project helped you understand a subject in much greater depth. The knowledge becomes yours because you synthesize the information from your sources and integrate that information into your paper. Your brain cannot be on "autopilot" when you are doing research. There are many positives about doing a research paper.

The following pages will guide you through the research process from start to finish.

Finding a Topic

Locating Sources

Evaluating Sources

Managing the Project

Taking Notes From Sources

Documenting Your Sources

Sample Student Research Paper (MLA)

Sample Student Research Paper (APA)

Finding a Topic

Since you will be spending a lot of time with your topic, you should explore a subject you are interested in. Even if your teacher gives you a topic, you usually have the latitude to choose a particular angle or offshoot of the assigned subject.

Use prewriting and discovery techniques like brainstorming, prewriting, and mind mapping, just as you would if you were writing a short essay. Talk to your friends and colleagues about your assignment. See if they have a different or unique perspective on the topic. Once you have a general topic, locate some preliminary sources to help you gather even more information on your topic.

Locating Sources

You will use the same prewriting and discovery techniques for a research paper that you do for an academic essay. One of the most important differences, however, is that you will spend more time preparing and gathering outside sources. You can cover a topic in depth, because you will have more time for research and topic development.

You need to gather enough information on your general topic in the preliminary stage of the paper process to be able to find an angle that is really worth writing about. Many times students are pressed for time and make ill-informed choices about paper topics because they have not done a background search for information. The result is an erroneous or substandard thesis based on a lack of information or misinformation.

How do you explore sources related to your topic? Much depends on your topic. If your topic is a current issue or problem, you will probably have better results if you start by exploring the Web. If, on the other hand, your topic is part of an established academic discipline -- history, anthropology, or sociology, for instance -- you may be expected to locate standard library sources, such as books and periodical articles. You need to decide what the best approach is for you. Below are some suggestions to help you get started.

1) If your topic is a current issue, then begin with the Web. Use search tools to locate preliminary readings on your topic to generate ideas. For an overview of search tools and links to some of the most popular tools, see Navigating Through Cyberspace: Online Research.

Realize at this point that general search tools are designed to provide you with links to general information, from personal home pages to corporate sites on your topic. Later in the process you will want to focus on only those sources that come from reliable sites.

2) If your topic is part of an established discipline, then begin with library research>. Some professors require that research papers be based on academic sources -- journals published by professional organizations and established presses or library books. Although there are some academic journals on the Web, in most cases your research will need to begin in the periodicals indexes or library books available to you in your campus library. Check to see what your library has available.

3) If your topic could be researched in either the library or on the Web, explore both at the outset. As you search, note differences between the results you get in the library and the results from the Web. Compare results with other students in your class. Whether you start with the library or the Web depends primarily on the topic and on the resources of your institution's library.

Evaluating Sources

When you locate sources that you are thinking of citing, you will need to take time to evaluate the information. Why? Your goal should be to locate authoritative, accurate, unbiased, current information on your topic -- not always an easy task. Read widely and critically before you begin to consider what sources to use in your paper. Only when you have developed sufficient background knowledge of your topic will you be ready to evaluate sources responsibly.

Evaluating Online Sources

Evaluating Printed Material

Books on your university's or college's library shelves usually went through a screening process before they were purchased, and thus books checked out of your school's library tend to be reliable as sources. But even books need to be scrutinized carefully: many are out-of-date or filled with biased information.

Periodicals include newspapers, magazines, and journals. Magazines are written for the general population, and your instructor might want you to use only journals, which contain articles written by experts in the field. How can you tell them apart? Magazines tend to be printed on glossy paper and have advertisements. The articles, although they identify their sources, do not follow a formal documentation style. Journals generally don't have commercial advertisements, and the authors use formal documentation in their papers. Scholars in the field scrutinize journal articles before they are published; therefore, they tend to have a great deal of credibility.

When looking at books or other print materials, keep the following things in mind:

• The authority of the author
• The timeliness of the information
• The bias of the source
• The publishing company

Managing the Project

One of the most difficult things about a research project is time management. You can make out a time schedule and keep a research journal and/or log of your activities, or you can print out the following table and fill in the dates that your teacher gives you for deadlines and your own personal deadlines. Breaking the paper into manageable tasks makes the project less intimidating.

A sample project schedule may be of aid to you.

You can use this log to plan your time. Use PROJECT TASK DUE DATE for the deadlines that your teacher assigns you and PERSONAL TASK DUE DATE for the actions you will need to complete the project tasks, for example, going to the library, setting aside time to read and take notes from sources. In the column labelled ACTION TAKEN, note what you did and the date you completed the task. You will work more efficiently if you plan your time wisely and note what you have done. In a long project, it is easy to forget what you have already done and inadvertently backtrack.

Taking Notes From Sources

When you find a source that contains information that you would like to use in your paper, take notes on that source and write down all of the bibliographic information so you can accurately document it.

The most important thing to remember at this stage of the research process is to stay organized. If you work on a computer, set up a folder for your research project, and within that folder, create sub-folders corresponding to any sub-points or components of your topic. For example, if your general topic is immigration, you might have sub-folders on topics such as the following: legal immigration, illegal immigration, human rights abuses, and similar subdivisions of the issue.

Take notes in your own words, unless you think you might want to quote directly from your source. If you use direct quotations as you take notes, be sure to copy the passage accurately and to put quotation marks around the words you copy verbatim. When it is time to type up your paper, you will easily be able to tell which passages are summarized and which ones are quoted.

If you quote, select only passages that are distinctively expressed. Paraphrase or summarize information whenever possible. Paraphrasing means restating the material in your own words. Your paraphrased notes will be almost as long as the original text, then. Summarizing means taking a large passage or chunk of material and condensing it by putting the main point of the passage in your own words. Summaries tend to be no longer than 1/3 of the original text. Summarizing and paraphrasing require that you synthesize the information while you are taking the notes. It is easier to quote when you are in the library, but you are just postponing the inevitable. The sooner you synthesize the information, the closer you are to writing your first serious draft of the paper.

No matter whether you quote, paraphrase, or summarize, always record the source reference information on the notes themselves or on a separate bibliography card. You will need this information when you write the paper and put together the list of sources.

Documenting Your Sources

When you report the results of your research, you are expected to let readers know where you got your information. There are several purposes in documenting sources:

1) You must give credit to the author of ideas, facts, and statistics that you use in your paper.
2) Citing sources gives your paper more credibility, because you have the words and ideas of scholars in the field helping you express and support your opinions.
3) Your readers might want to find the sources that you have used to start their own research.

Keeping those three purposes for documentation in mind can help guide you in knowing when to document material. If the information is not common knowledge in the field and it is not your original idea or opinion on the topic, you should document it.

You will place a note inside the text itself, letting your readers know that the material is not original. You will then follow up with a complete listing of your sources at the end of the paper. There are various methods of documentation; the method you use will depend on your discipline. Different disciplines emphasize different information in documentation. For example, in the social sciences, where dates are very important when citing research, the citation format includes the date of publication in each parenthetical citation. CBE (Council of Biology Editors) endorses two styles. One includes arranging the reference list according to the order in which the sources were numerically cited in the text, and the other lists author and date in a parenthetical citation in the text along with a reference list at the end. It is a matter of emphasis. The information that a discipline deems important will probably be the information that is included in the citation. Ask your teacher for guidance on what style you are to choose. A list of documentation styles follows:

MLA Documentation
APA Documentation
CM Documentation
CBE Documentation
COS Documentation

Documenting Online Sources

MLA Documentation

MLA documentation is used in the humanities, including English. MLA documentation requires an in-text parenthetical citation with the author's last name and the page number that the source material came from. If you use the author's last name in your source attribution, then you need only put the page number in parentheses. At the end of the paper, you will include a list of all of the sources you used in the paper entitled Works Cited, alphabetized by the author's last name.

For a detailed explanation of MLA citations, see A Guide for Writing Research Papers based on Modern Language Association (MLA) Documentation from Capital Community College, an academic leader in producing helpful Web tutorials and materials for English students.

Sample MLA Paper

APA Documentation

APA documentation is used mainly in the social sciences, and although the format uses parenthetical documentation, the citation includes the author's last name and the date of publication of the materials. If you are quoting directly, you will also cite the page number, but you shouldn't have as many direct quotations in APA as you would in MLA, since many academic authors of English papers quote from the literature they are discussing.

An excellent source for learning details on the APA method of documentation is APA In-Text Citation from the Writer's Workshop at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

In addition, the American Psychological Association Web site has a great deal of information on how to cite electronic resources in Electronic Reference Formats Recommended by the American Psychological Association.

Sample APA paper

CM Documentation

The Chicago Manual of Style uses a footnoting or endnoting system for documenting sources within a paper. There is a corresponding bibliography at the end of the paper for cross reference. You can find detailed information about using the Chicago Manual of Style, sometimes called the Turabian method, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Writing Center in the Writer's Handbook page entitled Documentation: Chicago Style.

CBE Documentation

The Council of Biology Editors' citation style is used in the natural sciences and endorses two formats. One is a citation-sequence system, which includes arranging the reference list according to the order in which the sources were numerically cited in the text. The other is a style that lists author and date in a parenthetical citation in the text along with a reference list at the end of the work.

For a detailed explanation of the CBE style of documentation, see the University of Illinois Writing Center's Writing Handouts page on CBE documentation.

COS Documentation

The Columbia Guide to Online Style by Janice R. Walker and Todd Taylor (Columbia UP, 1998) provides a guide to documenting electronically accessed sources according to two types of styles: humanities (MLA and Chicago) and scientific (APA and CBE). COS guidelines have been endorsed by the Alliance for Computers and Writing and have been accepted by many scholars and academics.

For a detailed explanation of COS guidelines in both humanities and scientific styles, visit the following Web site: Basic CGOS Style.

A COS style sheet containing additional examples of APA-style citations can be found at Columbia Online Style: APA-Style Citations of Electronic Sources.

A COS style sheet containing additional examples of MLA-style citations can be found at Columbia Online Style: MLA-Style Citations of Electronic Sources.

Citing Your Sources in COS
Parenthetical (In-Text) Citations

Parenthetical references to print publications usually include the author's last name and the page number of the reference (MLA) or the author's last name, the date of publication, and the page number of the reference (APA, CBE). However, for many electronic sources, some or all of these elements may be missing. Parenthetical references to electronic sources therefore include only an author's last name or, if no author's name is available, the file name. For scientific styles, use the date of publication or the date of access if no publication date is available.

For files without a determinable author, editor or organization, include the file name in parentheses (i.e., writing.html). For scientific styles with no designation of publication date, include the date of access instead, in day-month-year format (i.e., 31 July 2000).

If they are included in the electronic text, list navigational aids such as page, section, or paragraph numbers at the conclusion of the citation, separated by commas. For most electronic sources, however, navigational aids will not be included.

Preparing a Works Cited General Format in COS
As a general rule, the second and subsequent lines of a COS or MLA citation are indented five spaces from the start of the first line.

Author's Last name, Author's First name. "Title of Document." Title of Complete Work (if applicable). Version or File Number, if applicable. Document date or date of last revision (if different from access date). Protocol and address, access path or directories (date of access).