Research Paper

Purpose

The research paper is a mainstay in scientific work. Writing up research has many practical benefits: it solidifies your thinking; it encourages you to compose methodically; it allows other researchers to learn from your work and challenge your thinking, pushing the boundaries of knowledge in your field. Ultimately, the research paper is an academic genre intended to help you share knowledge and enter the conversations taking place in your chosen field. This assignment gives you practice in this genre.

But the research paper is only one channel scientists use to communicate. Because discovering and reporting knowledge in the sciences is an iterative process, research emerges among a variety of audiences through documents such as proposals, internal lab reports, presentations, posters, public media reports, white papers, policy guidance, etc. You can therefore think of the research paper as a step in the process of establishing scientific knowledge. It incorporates pieces of writing generated in previous documents, and it becomes a source of content and knowledge for future communications.

Our semester project follows the iterative process of scientific knowledge-making by asking you to build from one assignment to the next. Think of your Research Paper as one point of interaction between you and an audience. For our class, the Research Paper is where you build on the work you have done in the Literature Review, Audience and Context Analysis, and Method Design to establish findings that you will communicate here and later in your Presentation and Public Communication.

You are invited to use this Research Paper to supplement work you are doing in other classes or professional environments. Although you are not permitted to submit a paper for this assignment that you have previously completed (double dipping), you can use this opportunity to advance other research activities. For example, students have used this assignment to begin a thesis project or complete one part of a larger research agenda.

Assignment

The Research Paper should identify a coherent research question within a defined subject, forward a thesis that answers it, outline the study's systematic method, and provide associated results and discussion. Because our Research Paper is shorter than most published scholarship and our time and access to material resources are limited, our work will be smaller in scope and scale.

There are many different ways to answer a research question systematically including primary data approaches such as:

• field observations
• experiments
• surveys

or secondary data approaches such as:

• systematic review (and meta-analysis)
• correlation studies
• discourse analysis (and text mining)

We will discuss these and other options. Whatever research question you devise, your goal will be to answer it as systematically, reproducibly, and objectively as you can within the confines of our assignment.

Requirements

Your Research Paper should:

• Be approximately 3,000 words in length (not including bibliography)
• Reference at least eight documented sources
• Conform to a common citation system of your choice (AMA, APA, MLA, etc.)
• Be submitted as a file (.pdf preferred)
• Follow a general IMRaD structure and sequence:
  1. Introduction: Orients your reader to the subject, acknowledges relevant literature to identify a knowledge gap, identifies the research question that the paper investigates, and forwards the thesis that provides a response to it (your Literature Review can help you with this section)
  2. Methods: Articulates the processes the study went through to answer its research question, attending to both practical and theoretical issues (your Method Design can help you with this section)
  3. Results: Presents the outcome of applying your methods
  4. Discussion: Interprets what the results reveal and discusses how these findings contribute to the subject's research discourse
  5. Conclusion: Recaps findings, identifies the current study's limitations, and outlines where future research could go from here

You should use existing authentic examples of academic scholarship as models, such as those you have identified in your Literature Review. The annotated examples from previous students attached below also may be helpful, but make sure to read the comments, because some aspects may not meet our assignment parameters.

• Survey Download Survey
• Meta-analysis Download Meta-analysis
• Experiment Download Experiment