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How to write a research paper

Technical Report · February 2020

DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.21967.64164

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 How to write
a research paper
Ronán M Conroy
An RCSI Data Science Centre Guide
rconroy@rcsi.ie

Search for the truth is the noblest occupation of man;

its publication is a duty.
Madame de Staël (1766 – 1817)
 Writing a research paper
The RCSI Data Science Centre Guides
These topic guides are provided to the research community as part of the
Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland Data Science Centre's education and
training remit.
The guides are updated regularly.
Researchers affiliated with RCSI can contact the Data Science Centre
(data@rcsi.com) for support. We cannot, however, offer support to the wider
research community.

This guide should be cited as

Conroy, Ronán M. How to write a research paper: An RCSI Data Science
Centre Guide. 2020
Followed by the download URL and the date accessed.

RCSI Data Science Centre Guides

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 Writing a research paper
Contents
Introduction : why are papers written like that? 4
For writers and readers 4
Writing with a purpose 5
How a paper is structured 6
The research process 6
The sections of a research paper 7
Each element of a paper has a function 7
Title 8
Abstract 9
The copy/paste/edit method 9
Introduction 9
Introduction: purpose 9
Introduction: structure 9
The research question: the most important sentence in the paper 10
What is an aim and what is an objective? 10
The methods section 11
Participants 11
Measures 12
Results 12
Structure 12
What makes a good results section? 13
Clarity and flow 13
Completeness 13
Relationship between results and research question 13
Style tip : abbreviations 13
Discussion 13
A summary of existing knowledge 14
Integration of new knowledge 14
Implications of new knowledge 14
Strengths and limitations 14
References 14
Locating the right journal 15
Instructions for authors 15

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 Writing a research paper
Introduction : why are papers written like that?
Research papers are written in a standard format, whether they are scientific
papers, conference abstracts, theses etc. This standard format is extremely
useful, because it allows the reader to know in advance where to find what
they are looking for.
People seldom read a research paper from beginning to end like a novel,
because not everything in the paper is relevant to every reader. The science
literature is constantly expanding, at a rate that makes it virtually impossible
to read every word even in a fairly narrow subject area. So it’s important for a
reader to be able to locate the material they want swiftly.
And so papers are written to a standard format. In some ways, a paper is
like a supermarket. If you know the layout, then you can move efficiently,
getting the items you need in sequence, rather than bumbling about. Do you
need to know how the authors sampled the people they studied? Or do you
need to see where they sourced the questionnaire they used? Or how they
think their results add to our understanding? Each of these questions will
send you to a different place in the paper. Know where to look and you will
have the answers in a trice.

For writers and readers

Although this guide is intended for people who are writing papers, it’s
also useful for understanding how papers are written. And though it’s
primarily aimed at research papers, it also applies to theses, and has even
been used by people doing postgraduate degrees.

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 Writing a research paper
Writing with a purpose
The most important thing about writing a paper is that it should be
purposeful. A reader of a novel is just looking for something interesting to
read. But the reader of a research paper will have a list of questions in mind
before they start; they will read the paper to find the answers. So a clear
structure will make sure that the reader can find the information they need
because it is a) there and b) in the right place.
These are the questions a reader might ask (and, indeed, these are the
questions that you should probably be asking as you read a paper) :

What the reader will want to know Specific questions

Is the research question relevant to me?
What data did the authors collect to
answer the question?
What results did they find?
What question does this paper try to answer?
What is the setting of the research?
What was the study design?
How was the sample defined and gathered?
What measures were used to collect the data?
What precautions against bias were built into the
design?
Is there a flowchart that shows the data collection
and analysis process?
Who did they study?
What did they find?
What relationships did they explore?

Are there biases in the research that could
have an important impact on the
conclusions?
What is the significance of the results for
our knowledge and understanding?
What differences between groups that are being
compared could have distorted the comparison?
Could the study setting, sample, measures have
influenced the conclusions?
How does it add to knowledge in the area?
What implications has it for for practice?
What research should we be doing next?

So when you write a paper, you keep these questions in mind.

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 Writing a research paper
How a paper is structured
The structure of a paper follows the structure of the research process itself. If
you visualise the research process, you will see how it also describes the flow
through the sections of the paper.

The research process

The research process is the process we use to decide how to go about finding
something out. The process starts by focussing in on a relevant question,
moves through the process of gathering data and then uses the data to try to
answer the question.

Current$state$of$ Select$question$ Develop$the$

our$knowledge$ that$needs$to$be$ methods$to$
and$understanding answered gather$data

Gather$data

Integrate$
findings
Interpret$
into$current$ Analyse$data
findings
knowledge$and$
understanding

The$Research$Process

A question starts when we find a gap in our knowledge or understanding. We

begin by developing methods to gather the data needed to answer it. We then
actually go out and gather the data. We analyse this data, interpret our
findings and finally integrate them into the current state of our knowledge.
It’s a circular process. In many ways, human knowledge is like a jigsaw. Each
piece of research adds a piece to the puzzle. Some pieces simply add more
detail, but other pieces make us pause and re-interpret the picture.

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 Writing a research paper
The sections of a research paper
You can map the elements of a scientific paper onto the research process:

Current$state$of$ Select$question$ Develop$the$

our$knowledge$ that$needs$to$be$ methods$to$
and$understanding answered gather$data

Introduction Introduction Methods

Gather$data

Integrate$
findings
Interpret$
into$current$ Analyse$data
findings
knowledge$and$
understanding
Discussion Discussion Results

The$Research$Process

Each element of a paper has a function

Element Purpose
Title Describes the research uniquely

Abstract A map of the paper containing the most important

information needed to understand it

Introduction Justifies the research and introduces the research question

Methods Shows how the research question was translated into a

practical data-gathering exercise

Results Presents the findings without comment

Discussion Shows how the research adds to our knowledge and

understanding, reviews its strengths and limitations, and
discusses its implications for practice and future research

References Lists all works referred to in the paper

Appendices/supplementary Some material such as questionnaires, technical details of

material methods, etc may be of limited interest. These are often
published online as supplementary material. In a thesis or
report, they may be included after the main body of the text
as appendices.

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 Writing a research paper

Title
Your title is your first selling point. Make sure it tells the prospective reader
the most important things about your work.
Researchers try to come up with titles that are unique and helpful. The title
should tell the reader :
• The research question
• The methods used, and, if relevant,
• The population studied.
In practice you will find that titles succeed to a greater or lesser extent in
fulfilling these objectives. However, if you know what should be in a title, then
you can write a better one.
Some titles also try to tell you the results. Interestingly, papers that do so tend
to be less often cited in the literature than papers that describe the question!

Example Titles Comments

The Irish National Adverse Events Study
(INAES): the frequency and nature of
adverse events in Irish hospitals—a
retrospective record review study.
Exploring the antipathy of nursing staff in
secure healthcare facilities across the
United Kingdom to young people who self-
harm.
Mountaineering and Climbing Techniques
in the Curriculum of Mountain Medicine
Education Programs: A Survey of the
European Courses for Mountain Medicine
Cross-national differences in older adult
loneliness
Bar graphs depicting averages are
perceptually misinterpreted
Effects of selenium supplementation for
cancer prevention in patients with
carcinoma of the skin: a randomized
controlled trial.
Absolutely clear.
The research question and population are
clear here, though the methods are not.
Qualitative? Survey?
Checks all the boxes – clear question,
method described (a survey) and
population (European courses for mountain
medicine)
The question is clear, though the methods
and population are not. Still, the
international comparisons are the selling
point here
This paper skips straight to the finding,
leaving us to figure out the question (easy)
and the methods (close to impossible)
Note how the authors appended the study
design to the title – a useful trick.

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 Writing a research paper
You can see that your title is very important, so write it carefully. When you
are submitting a paper to a journal, it’s the first thing that the editor will read,
so a well-written title is going to favour your chances of publication.

Abstract
The abstract is a map of the paper.
Think for a moment about what makes a map useful. The first thing (and it’s
so obvious that you didn’t think of it) is that a map is much smaller than the
thing it shows. So how do you make a small map of a big thing? By leaving
things out. A map shows the essential structure, leaving out needless detail.
An abstract works the same way. You should write your abstract very carefully
so that it will convey all the essential elements of the research as briefly and
accurately as possible. It’s worth spending quite some time making sure that
the abstract is as clear and accurate as possible – remember : anyone
interested in the research will start by reading the abstract. Indeed, the
abstract is often the only thing you need to read to understand a piece of
research. The actual paper just fills in the details.
The copy/paste/edit method
When you are writing an abstract, use the copy/paste/edit method.
• Locate and copy relevant text from your paper,
• Paste it in place in the abstract and
• Edit it to reduce the word count by eliminating unnecessary detail,
summarising etc.
This ensures that the text of your abstract is closely based on text from your
paper. Never write an abstract “off the top of your head”. You are likely to
misrepresent your study, or at the very least to introduce discrepancies
between the paper and the abstract.

Introduction
The introduction to a scientific paper is the most important part of the paper. This is
because the introduction is where the authors show why their research is needed to
fill a gap in our knowledge or understanding.

Introduction: purpose
The purpose of the introduction is to
• describe the context of the research by summarising knowledge to date,
• draw attention to something we don’t know or understand or haven’t yet
tested,
• and to tell us how the authors planned to fill this gap in our knowledge.
Introduction: structure
The introduction usually follows a three part structure.

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 Writing a research paper
1. An introduction to what is known already. This is not intended as a beginner’s
introduction but to provide the context for the research by outlining the current state
of knowledge.
2. What is not known. The abstract should focus smoothly and rapidly on the
unknown, paving the way for the most important sentence in the whole paper:
3. A statement of the research question.
The research question: the most important sentence in the paper
The research question (sometimes called the conceptual question) is a plain-
language statement of the question that the research will answer.
In the biomedical literature, the introduction is usually very short. The
literature review focusses very briefly on the state of knowledge, and uses
only a few key references. The main literature review is deferred until the
discussion.
In social and behavioural sciences, on the other hand, the introduction can
include quite a substantial literature review. This should not be a simple
summary but should be a critical appraisal, so that the research aim arises
from an understanding of the deficiencies in the literature.

Examples of research questions

• The aim of this project was to study whether choosing a yes/no answer
format is a reasonable simplification compared to the frequently-applied five-
point rating scale.
• The goal of the current research was to fill an important gap in the literature
by examining whether loneliness was linked to stress-related pro-
inflammatory cytokine production.
• The aim of this study is to investigate the prevalence and sociodemographic
correlates of the four symptoms of insomnia in a sample taken from the
general population of South Korea.

What is an aim and what is an objective?

All of these research questions were taken from papers my library, more or
less at random. They all use the word “aim” or “goal”.
• An aim, or a goal, is the outcome that you intend to achieve.
• Objectives are the tasks that will have to be completed in order to achieve
the aim. Objectives are definable, measurable achievements.

The research question is the most important sentence you will write
because it directly determines the relevance of the study. When you
are reading a research paper, locate the research question, which is
almost always in the last paragraph of the introduction. This will tell
you how relevant the paper is to you.

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 Writing a research paper

Notice, too, is that the aims are always are clear but general. In the first
example, the authors are interested in seeing if simplifying questionnaires will
maintain data quality while making questionnaires easier to fill in. But they
will have to decide what kind of questionnaire(s) they are going to study, and
what kind of participants. Their research will produce an answer to the
research question, but not the answer.
Or look at the third example: the authors are going to have to define insomnia,
and then measure it (questionnaire? interview? medical notes?), and also
define the sociodemographic factors similarly. They will end up reporting the
associations between insomnia and sociodemographic factors as they define
and measure them in the sample that they survey.
Aims are general. Each study will translate the aim into specific objectives in
terms of the methods used to gather and analyse the data. These objectives
will be laid out in the methods section.

The methods section

The function of the methods section is to translate the research question into
a study methodology by specifying who the research will study, how it will
define and measure the variables of interest, and how it will analyse the data –
in other words, it sets objectives for the study.
But – and this is the crucial point – the methodology can only be judged as
good or bad by referring it back to the study aim. So it's important to make
sure that your aim and methodology align. The methodology should take each
element of the aim and define it in terms of a data collection and analysis
activity.
Participants
Defining the study population is a key decision that determines the quality and
relevance of the study. The study must focus on a relevant population, and
must draw a representative sample. You should provide eligibility criteria
that define who was eligible to take part in the study, and should state any
exclusion criteria. You should then describe how the participants were
identified and sampled.
Bias can enter a study through the use of eligibility criteria that exclude
people who should reasonably be part of the study population. For example, a
significant proportion of research on coronary heart disease excludes older
people, despite coronary heart disease being an important health problem in
older people. Eligibility criteria can threaten the external validity of a study
– the degree to which the study applies to the real-life setting. They need to be
carefully described so that people can judge the relevance of the sample.
If participants are being chosen on the basis of a symptom or disorder, then
the criteria being used to define it need to be validated, standard criteria.

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 Writing a research paper
Measures
The research will have to collect data. The methods used to collect data are
often described as measures. And once again, different methods will produce
different results. In the insomnia example above, there is a major difference
between people who report that they have suffered from insomnia in the past
month and those who report that on three or more nights in the previous week
they have been awake for two or more hours between going to bed and
getting up the next day. The first criterion allows people to decide what
insomnia is. Fair enough, but it makes it difficult to interpret the results. If we
ran the survey in France and asked the same question, would French people
interpret the word insomnie in the same way as an Irish person, or a Finn
would interpret unettomuus? The second method – requiring three or more
nights with two or more hours of wakefulness – will produce different results,
but these results should be more comparable between different populations.
The measures used must be valid (there is evidence that they really measure
what they are supposed to measure) and reliable (they should measure it
with little error). Generally speaking, researchers will select a measurement
instrument that is already tested and found to perform adequately in the
population that they intend studying. Researchers favour measurement
instruments that are already tried and tested because this allows them to
compare their findings with previous findings in the literature.

Results
The Results section contains two things : the results (as you would expect)
and nothing else. In other words, you should present your results in full
before beginning to discuss them. This is important, because the reader must
be left to read the results undisturbed before you try to tell them what the
results mean. The most common mistake that people make when writing up
research is to mix discussion into the results section.
Style tip: avoid expressions like “interestingly”. If the results are interesting,
the reader will judge for themselves.
Structure
Many papers divide the results into three sections:
1. Who or what they studied – the reader can then judge whether the
research is relevant and see what bias, if any, could have arisen from the
selection of participants.
2. What they found – the reader can see the data that resulted from the
research summarised using descriptive statistics and graphs.
3. Relationships between who or what was studied and what happened – the
reader can see if different groups of participants have different outcomes
There are many variations on this sequence, but as a rule the participants are
described first, the main outcomes next, and more complex analyses looking
at specific subgroups comes last.
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 Writing a research paper
The results are usually presented as text with accompanying tables or
graphics. The text should summarise the results, leaving the tables to show
them in precise detail and using graphs to show key patterns in the data
visually.

What makes a good results section?

Clarity and flow
When you write your results section, you should aim for a clear presentation
of the data and the trends in them, written in a logical order that builds up a
picture of the findings step by step. Think carefully about whether to present
results are text, tables or graphs. Each has a role. Graphs are good for
showing patterns and relationships. Tables are resources where you can put
detailed results, but people don’t (can’t!) read them in their entirety. Text is
the narrative thread, talking the reader through the results that are presented
in the graphs and tables. Some results, indeed, are so simple that they can be
presented in the text alone.
Completeness
You also need to check whether there are any unexplained gaps or
inconsistencies in the results. This is where many modern research papers
present a flow chart to show the data gathering process, allowing the reader
to appreciate how and where data was lost to the study. One such flowchart is
the CONSORT diagram, used for reporting the flow of patients through a
clinical trial.
Relationship between results and research question
The results should be presented and analysed in such a way as to answer the
research question. Indeed, there should be a clear linkage between the title,
which announces the research; the research question; the methods, which
translate the research question into a research project, and the results
section, which summarises and analyses the findings.
Style tip : abbreviations
Abbreviations do not save the forests of Finland, and they can make papers
very hard to read. In general, use only abbreviations that would be used in
everyday speech – people do say IQ, for example. Some abbreviations are so
common in a particular subject area that they can be safely used, such as CI
or CHD for confidence interval or coronary heart disease. But avoid inventing
abbreviations that are specific to your paper. It can make your writing,
especially in the results section, very hard to follow.

Discussion
In this section, the research findings are discussed in the context of what’s
already known about the topic.
The section is usually divided into three parts:

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 Writing a research paper
A summary of existing knowledge
The discussion begins with a restatement of the research question. Your aim is
to show how the new research findings relate to previous research. In
biomedical papers, the literature review is done here. In social and
behavioural science papers, the literature review tends to be done in the
introduction.
Integration of new knowledge
Having presented the findings in the results section, you can now discuss
what they mean. You should set the findings in the context of other published
findings, discussing how they differ from or compare to what is already known
in published papers. Where do they extend our knowledge?
Implications of new knowledge
You should make explicit the implications of the new findings for practice. Do
the findings suggest that we should be doing things differently? That we need
to rethink our priorities? That future research needs to be conducted
differently?
Many research studies raise more questions than they answer and the
discussion section should outline what new research could be carried out in
light of these findings.
Don’t forget that a study can be important not only because of the findings but
also because of the methods used. You should of course acknowledge any
weaknesses in your research that place limitations on its interpretation, but
also draw attention to the features that make the findings a significant
contribution to the area. In what way is your study better than previous
studies?
Strengths and limitations
If a person reads the whole paper, they should be aware of the strengths and
limitations of the research. However, for people skimming it (and this means
for most readers!) the authors should summarise the key features of the study
that contribute to the reliability and validity of the findings.
Reliability features are ones that reduce random error – large sample size,
carefully controlled measurements etc. Validity features are ones that reduce
bias – representativeness of sample, completeness of data, ability to adjust for
background variables that might have biased the conclusions etc.

References
With modern bibliographic software, there is no excuse for having references
in the wrong style, or just plain wrong. Use software from the outset. Software
that allows you to keep your references online for use anywhere is useful.
Free options include Mendeley (mendeley.com), Zotero (https://
www.zotero.org) and ReadCube (readcube.com).

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 Writing a research paper
Locating the right journal
You will often be able to select an appropriate journal simply by looking
through your bibliography. However, it's also worth pasting your abstract into
JANE, an online semantic search system that identifies journals that have
published significant numbers of similar articles. You'll find the site at http://
jane.biosemantics.org.

Instructions for authors

It's important to follow the journal's instructions for authors correctly. Failure
to do so can mean that your paper is unpublishable (for example, unsuitable
or too long) or is in the wrong format (which makes it look like you originally
submitted it to another journal!).
You will find a wonderful website at the Mulford Health Science Library of the
University of Toledo with which you can locate the author instructions of any
health journal. http://mulford.utoledo.edu/instr/

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