How to Write an Effective Research Paper

[Music] so let me begin by introducing myself and my our service so our company is called sa review and we do edit essays but we also mostly edit research papers so you research papers dissertations manuscripts journal cover letters anything that you might need for universities for submission or for research or journals etc and before we go on I'm gonna tell you a bit about myself so I am the managing editor at an essay review and what my job is is to edit papers and also to check what other other editors see and how they head it so personally I have a degree in a master's degree in English I am NOT a scientific researcher but I have edited hundreds and hundreds of scientific manuscripts so what we're going to talk about today is going to be about writing quality so we're not going to focus on research or how to do research but how to make your research paper better so that you can get good grades and you will be able to get into journals and get your work published that's the point right so the content of the lecture today we're going to start with an overview of what is research writing will then talk about the structure of the research paper what parts it's composed of and you'll see there's four parts and following that we will talk about composing each section how do you start from the beginning and compose each section and then we will discuss some tips for improving the quality of writing okay so the question we want to ask first is what the what is the point of the research paper what's the purpose as you might know the main purpose is to share your knowledge share the knowledge you've gained in your study with others especially with researchers you want to show how your study fits into the current science and if you're writing for a popular journal such as science or nature or one of the more the popular or science journals then you're going to be informing the public so regular people not just researchers so let's talk about four important factors of research writing now this is not research itself but research writing so first factor we're going to consider is coherence it wants all and that means including all of the necessary information in every section what is the necessary information we will get to that later it means not repeating the information so writing we see many times writers use the same phrase again again again it looks very unprofessional so you want to try to avoid that the next factor is organization an organization is basically the structure the IM rd who has heard of IM rd or i am our ad have any of you heard that this structure maybe once you know what it stands for you you'll know I am our D stands for introduction methods results discussion so that's going to be what we will discuss today it's the body of the or of most research papers you want to put the right content in the right place okay so that's we're going to show you how to do that the third factor of writing is relevance relevance means a lot of things but it means conforming to the length guidelines it means choosing the right data so for example if you have a research paper that's 4,000 words you don't want to write 10 results or 10 methods probably you want a smaller amount of methods so what the exact answer is it's it's really up to you but you want to make sure that your the research methods and results you include are relevant and most important the most important methods most important results fourth factor of writing is clarity clarity means writing clearly writing elegantly and nicely so it should be really easy to read and understand your paper should not be a struggle I understand the English is not most of your first language is your first language so we don't expect in most journals don't expect you to get the language perfect and when you send the manuscript to editor what do you kill John Hart the editor I didn't kill tonight they they just edit for grammar and for clear communication they cannot change the structure of your of your paper so this is going to be up to you but as far as clarity goes we can help you with that as editors so you need to use proper grammar phrasing and style and not to too many extra words ok this below I don't know if you can see but this is kind of a golden rule for all rules you want to check the formatting and style rules of your target journal so if you have if you're applying to I don't know bioscience monthly you want to read everything about about four about authors or four authors section and you want to read as many articles as possible to get a sense of what their articles look like ok so now that we've discussed that let's talk about research writing structure so basically there are four main parts in most research papers that you need to follow and they're usually in this order and that is introduction methods results and the discussion sometimes you have a concluding paragraph you've probably seen this structure before I imagine but maybe you haven't learned learn exactly what to do with them I mean who here has written a research paper for a journal raise your hand if you've written a paper for a journal okay a couple of you how about have you written a research paper for a class no mother young woman there's how's that that's what voiceover yeah for class if not then yeah is a really good lecture to attend because we're going to be talking about the basics but even researchers who have written many many articles can still benefit from learning how to to write how to write these sections better so your information actually moves from broad to specific and back to broad so this is the shape of the research paper you notice it has a sort of funnel shape so you start with the introduction what is known the basic topic that you're going to discuss and you quickly move into the literature what is what is unknown what are the gaps in the literature and in the middle here you can see this is your hypothesis so you're going to give a very short statement about what your research study is doing what's the purpose of it and your methods and results section as you can see here methods and results are the shortest they're the shortest part of your paper but they're the most compact they have the most data and at the end your discussion is a bit longer so this is just the structure okay so let's talk about the each part in particular and this is the order that you will usually read a research paper so the introduction what does it do introduction discusses the problem that you're going to research it discusses the background and describes how your research fits in to the known information you'll also see a lot of primary literature introduced so a lot of citations and that is the introduction is the place where you see the most citations this study Smith and and Burke 1995 right those citations for other studies you see the introduction ok the methods quickly tell you how you did that tell us how you did the study and which materials and methods of experimentation which methods of analysis you used the results explained the important findings of your study they do not discuss the importance of the findings they simply talk about what you found what your methods found and finally the discussion and explains what your findings mean why are they important and what are the implications for other research it also can talk about limitations you know if you study about farming and you study about cows you do a research about cows you could say you know this study applies to this kind of cow but it might not apply to other cows so these are limitations you need to include and you can discuss possible research in the future all right so let's do our first quiz and if you know the answer just raise your hand any time you don't have to wait for me to finish and I'll try to choose whoever is first okay which one your quiz is not in the PPT bTW there's no answer okay which one is not a factor that affects quality of research writing is it a coherence the clarity see novelty deep organization see novelty are you sure that's right right good um so you can get a coupon afterwards if you like so novelty might affect your research right you want to do a study of something that hasn't been done before but you don't want to write in a crazy way you know it's not a creative writing course right so you don't want to be the one that writes you know and it's in a novel way you want to follow the rules okay number two what does the discussion conclusion section do hey presents the findings of your research B gives the context and background of your research C explains the meaning of the findings includes implications and limitations D discusses how your study was conducted yes C discussion explains the meaning of the findings think they'll genome that's right okay so that in the discussion is where you talk about why your study's important and will show you how to do that moving on let's talk about how to compose paper as you saw earlier know whether to move over here or stay here my move later okay so even though your introduction comes first you actually begin with the methods section you're going to write that first and then you will write the results the discussion and finally the introduction and the reason for this is so you don't leave anything out in the introduction you don't include something you know something new in the discussion that you didn't introduce so everything all of the main meat of the paper should be introduced it's like a summary right summarize what your studies going to do you're not going to put exact figures and data about your study but you're gonna discuss what your your study yielded what you did okay and before writing your paper you should you should know what your hypothesis is and you should know what your research questions are so for example what did this study seek to find one example of this question is the study sought to find how many University students are satisfied with their school's facilities okay another question you need to know the answer to what is your study's main arguments or questions for example this study how many students report satisfaction with materials what are the most common complaints students make about their universities I'm sure you have some common complaints in your mind but if you're doing a study on on universities and satisfaction with the university classes this would be one of your main questions you should find the answer to this question in the results you also want to decide which audience or journal you're writing for this really the only way to know how to do this is to is to read the articles in the journal or if you're applying for a conference to research that conference and see what other authors how other authors write that's about all we can say about that okay so the first thing to do before actually writing the section is to prepare the figures and tables this is the your core data this is the most important aspect of your research paper right so you want to gather and create and gather everything in one place so you have your data you're gonna make it into figures and tables you've probably already done that before you put a pen to the paper then you want to give those data captions and numbers so you want to put them in order so you know what order you're going to be writing about them when you write the methods and results right so place them in the order you have because your paper will just be writing in the sentence this data when John or Montoya just gonna make sentences out of the data that's what a paper is really all right so in the second step you're going to write the methods so this is really the first part of the paper here's some questions you should ask how was the study carried out and analyzed in this section you should describe experiments explain why procedures were chosen why you use this method of analysis or why you took this simple explain how your results were analyzed and this is usually the order I'll show you here actually organization okay so the first the first content you will write about is your materials that you used that means where you where you got your materials and if you do a sample study what your sample is you know a adult is it adults age 25 to 30 or is it children so you're gonna put that right away in the beginning how am ii you're going to discuss how materials were prepared what did you do with the materials to get ready to study them third how are your measurements made okay you can talk about that the techniques you use to measure your your data and and forth what methods of analysis did you use you get into more and more detail as you go on okay and here's some rules you usually want to just if you think about it chronologically so what did you do first we did this first and then we did this and then we did this that's a good way to organize also when you do the results your results should be in the same order as your methods you can also organize it from most to least important so if you have methods that are you know very very central put those first the methods of analysis if you have other methods of analysis the details are mmm not the most important but you might want to you know tell your reader about them then you know put them lest your methods section is only about 10% right it's very short ten percent of your paper it could be longer than that it might be 20 percent but generally speaking methods is shorter than the other parts in this section these are in red you can see some Boombah Boombah grammar rules it's not it's not like a hard rule but generally speaking most journal articles use will use passive voice and past tense for the methods it's not again many teachers will say professors will say use active voice but we still find that in the methods passive voice and active are use but you should try to be consistent with your voice do not discuss the results okay don't talk about what you found just how you found it and be sure to use quantitative details in addition to your techniques and methods of analysis the first thing you're going to do is to create a list of your materials and methods this means if you know what you used for your study just make a list of them so in three groups you have materials and sample let's just say you have you used 100 grams of potatoes a cheese cloth and distilled water okay it's a very simple experiment very simple study your next group is your preparation so in a little phrase what did you do you skin the potato with a knife you you got katha : you blended the potatoes and water you store it in 13 degrees Celsius refrigerator for 24 hours so rut lists all of the things you did and also list your methods of analysis in phrases spectra spectrophotometer used to measure optical density I we calibrated it using signal linearization okay so it's not a sentence yet so from this you can write the information as a sentence so notice a and a are the same but we've just written a in a sentence formal so a plain cheesecloth pure distilled water and 100 grams of raw potatoes were purchased notice that you have your your materials in sample at the beginning next in preparing the categories extract 100 grams of potatoes were skinned with a paring knife washed and diced etc etc so and again in red we have the verbs there in past tense and passive voice so you can see what they how to put them in that in that tense and last you have your methods of analysis a spectrophotometer was used to measure optical density and calibrate it using signal linearization now you're ready to write your methods so you're going to separate the different methods into different paragraphs so this is one paragraph if you have methods of analysis you might you might separate this into a paragraph as well so it's try to keep your paragraphs separate based on the methods that you used in the methods of analysis that you used okay so we're going to look at a sample this sample I chose is from Public Library of Science PLoS you can find you can find free open source open access journals on this site open access papers so this one is about kimchi I thought it would be nice to do sample about kimchi so let's start with the heading base this student starts with the heading sample preparation now you don't need to use a heading you might be able to use it but not all journals use headings obviously but if you can it's helpful to show the reader that to organize your paper and show the reader where what you're doing in the upcoming paragraph so the first thing that this researcher does is discuss materials cite and simple xx kimchi samples made from Korean or Chinese kimchi cabbage were acquired via online markets okay so we have the where they're from and what the materials are and then you have the exact place where they were looked where they were procured there they came from Gyeonggi ching chong and then the chinese kimchi samples were purchased in the same month so you have the place and where in China they are purchased right and before we go on this these were all one sentence or one paragraph so I've separated them so you can see the different parts but you go then Tandang yell I just thought of that office I made it separated okay sorry about my Korean okay the next thing you'll do is explain the preparation how you prepared the materials so you're gonna have a lot of verbs here a lot of verbs each head of kimchi cabbage was cut its action the cut kimchi samples were stored in sealed bags the kit the samples were frozen using liquid nitrogen and then ground using electronic blender the ground samples were stored at negative 80 degrees Celsius using maldi-tof MS analysis okay so again you have passive voice and a lot of different verbs this is this is a style issue but it will help your your article not be so boring and repetitive if you use the same verbs again again again it's not really fun interesting to read okay so let's look at the second part of methods we won't read everything I'll just try to go through important parts so again this author notice the subheading maldi-tof MS analysis so what are what is this paragraph about well it's gonna be about this method of analysis it's really easy to know if you're you know skimming through the paper you can see where this information what this is so you start with how the major measurements and calculations were made start with the broad methods first so M malady tof MS analysis was performed in triplicate for kimchi samples without protein extraction and then you have this is how how this was done in order first kimchi samples were mixed and homogenized using a one to one ratio etc and then later on you have further details about the analysis methods so it explains the range of mass spectra and the extraction times etc so you have all these like these little quantitative details later so don't necessarily don't put these first start with the the methods of analysis first how did you do it and then later you can discuss for their details about how you how you analyzed your data okay what do I have here provide quantified details and measurements okay so not just a lot of many most the majority of use numbers can use a lot of numbers here okay so we have one to one ratio 30 percent two thousand to twenty thousand you can you can see this alright so the third one the third part of the methods they have mass fingerprinting analysis so this is the second method of analysis that they discuss and here they break it down into pca principal component analysis and HCA you'll see this later when we look at the results in the results section they will have the same order pca then HCA lists the analytical methods first quantified information second so you have the methods and in blue his some quantified data again HCA was used how it was done and here's the values in blue and again this is one paragraph so the author has squished it together but sort of it's it's micro organized right it's got it's still got this the each each each method of analysis separated but then the details are put after it but it will be a one this is one paragraph in the original okay so methods quiz let's see if you remember what I just said what statement about methods is not true hey headings are sometimes used in the methods section B methods are organized chronologically and an order of importance the methods section describes how experiments are done or D the methods contains information about research findings which one is not true yes you sir what's one D last one which is not true the methods contains information about research findings that's right wow you guys are three for three nice job the methods contains no information about findings just how you did the the the experiment or how you did the study which is the best example of a sentence found in the methods many people get this got this wrong or maybe it's my fault but there is one that is the best based on what we just talked about so try to keep that in mind hey 54 men ages 30 to 39 were placed in wooden chairs via the spectra meter readings worth fifty eight point nine nine nanometers respectively see cancer is a leading cause of death in the United States ordy researcher should place lives under a 300 times microscope yeah what's one hey first one I think you're the first one to get it right the first time nice job yeah why why do you think that's why is this the best answer Yeah Yeah right good thank you is it's clear like what the the simple is right this was actually maybe near the beginning well it's how the the sample was the procedure was undertaken right and we have our sample 54 men what their age are and then what you're doing to them I don't know what's going on with this this methods but what's happening in this experiment but okay let's move on to the results after you've finished the methods you're going to write the results on a switch again okay so the results tell you what you found so you're going to present the findings in the same order as I mentioned methods result method analysis one results of the analysis one methods of analysis two reasons the second set of results from that analysis you're going to present the data in figures and tables and as text so your result is your figures and tables and is also the text the text is the figures and tables is just explained in sentences you're going to report on data collection and participants and report data relevant to your research question so if you have many many many results you just choose the most important the most relevant to your research question well we'll skip through these you can read them later just because we have a very we have a lot to do so the organization of your results as I've mentioned several times same order as methods and answer the research question as presented in the figures so for example your research question that you said in the introduction was how do hospital patients over age 55 feel about post-operative care in the data or the way you'll present this based on the data might look like this hospital patients over the age of 55 were 30% more likely to report negative experiences with post-operative care okay this is what your general methods sorry your general results might look like one of your results then you can elaborate with secondary results so after you write your main result you put the details same with the methods you have the main method and then the details so the common the common negative issues reported were inattention by nurses etc and then here you can cite your figures and tables as well so let's talk about writing captions very quickly captions are not sentences they're almost always phrases starting with a noun your main keyword and then what your figure or table is measuring so if the survey question is let's say you asked some participants what do hospital patients over the age of 555 think about post-operative care and this is the the data you come up with probably doesn't really look like it makes sense but for the sake of the picture attitudes towards post-operative care of patients over 55 that's how you can write your caption and when you write your text you might you're going to write as a full sentence obviously so you're gonna write the captions first before you right the results section let's look at our example again so you can see they start with this malady TOF MS analysis that was the first method of analysis brought up in the method section right remember so this author addresses the research question with details about the data the malady tof EMS spectra of kimchi fermented for one two or three weeks were obtained in the mass range of two thousand twenty thousand MZ in total eighty spectra were recorded in triplicate so here's the data that they came up with and the second research question is how will malady tof MS approach what will the approach yield in terms in determining fermentation differences so this is what this is answering that question here's the secondary details however the mass range of actual acquired mass spectra was set to two thousand to ten thousand MZ mass Peaks greater than ten thousand were not detected in kimchi samples okay so you've got details about this analysis your caption presents data as a statement right here's your the caption PSP CA of mass spectra of Korean and kimchi Chinese kimchi during mass fermentation this is the text for this figure I know this is gets really dry looking at every detail visas just look at what it's what this authors doing okay again this is the subheading discrimination of kimchi by fermentation time based on geographical origin using PCA well that was our first method of analysis right PCA so this addresses an a second research question which is how were the kimchi samples differentiated using PCA they discuss how'd they examine these correlations they were expressed using three dimensional scatter plots so here's the scatter plots and then figure 1 shows the sample score plots and actually they list more details in their paper which I did not put here but you can see they start with discussing how they they analyzed the data what they came up with and then the details more details about the this data and they also say figure 1 shows the sample so they're referring they're having a sort of dialogue with the figures they're saying if you want to see the details of this look at figure 1 figure 1 shows X Y Z so there's a lot of discussing discussion about what is being shown in these figures okay here's the third paragraph remember it's one paragraph just this is the heading discrimination of kimchi by fermentation phase based on origin using HCA the HCA was the second method of analysis if you remember and another research question is addressed how were the kimchi samples differentiated using HCA these research question you should have in your mind before you write the paper so you can answer it in your results and here the this is not a comparison of it's not a discussion about the about the results just comparing basic the basic results so you're not discussing the meaning of the results you just basically comparing them so in contrast Korean kimchi sample D is not clearly associated with any of the Korean or Chinese kimchi samples so yeah so you're come you're showing how the samples differed but you'll see how later on in discussion section you're going to discuss what that means and the larger the larger importance of the findings but be careful not to include discussion in the results okay so let's talk about some data that guidelines for results this is just a few there's many things you want to keep in mind but generally indicate statistical test use with all relevant parameters so you standard the mean and standard deviation be specific median and interpersonal range be specific use quantitative details use mean and standard deviation to report normally distributed data use median and interpersonal range to report skewed data you could probably find these results guidelines and parameters in the journal and the four editors are I'm sorry the four authors section you can often find you know how they want you to report these four numbers use two significant digits you know don't write it don't write to point zero seven eight five six four four four unless you're dealing with I don't nano nano measurements never use percentages for very small samples okay use one out of two instead of fifty percent these are basic rules that if you read the four authors section you can get an idea of how to what to do in this section okay quiz three what should the results section include a a background information about your study B statements about data figures and tables C a concise hypothesis or problem statement D data from related research sources yes sir B it should include statements about data at figures and tables you guys are five for five better than the other schools so far should I tell you the other schools I think we done this that maybe later right your data in the figures and tables are the results written as sentences in the order so the reader understands that's all that's all it is okay you only get one question for results the fourth step which is that the fourth section is the discussion section so you're going to say here what there is mean what is the point of these results this is the easiest section to write but it's the hardest section to get right does that make sense many many authors can just write as much as possible and you can be a little bit looser in this section but what you want to do is sell your study why is your study important why do people want to read it why what are the implications of your work okay so you want to sell your data you know like a you're a Salesman saleswoman when you're when you're discussing these criticize and justify your studies methods suggest improvements for how other studies could be better done to get to get more information about this topic answer the question did your study contribute to knowledge in the field or not does your study help fill in the gap or did it fail you need to be honest - you can't you don't want to say in my study this was the most groundbreaking study about pizza ever done it's going to change the face of food and pizza well you probably want to be specific about the kind of pizza that year changing in he'll discuss the impact of the research on other top other areas if it's if it applies okay let's move let's keep going here here's some tips for discussion so first focus on what is most important they move to least important good rule start with an analysis of your results and then move to implications we'll show you the structure next so you're going to talk up a summary of the results why is it important what can be done to make it better divide the analysis by paragraph this goes with organization and clarity the writing factor don't smoosh everything together because the discussion section is very long so you don't want to just write one paragraph you need to make sure each paragraph is has a separate idea we'll skip the grammar stuff okay you can read the rest later because there's a lot of details but I want to look at the structure and what the author has done to put the correct structure here okay in this discussion they have not used any headings for some reason there's no headings but they've still organized each paragraph there each one paragraph by topic so they start by summarizing the process the results and overall purpose so in this study maldi-tof ms was utilized to discriminate between Chinese and Korean kimchi of different geological words so you'll see this sentence in your introduction to the discussion and the introduction have a lot in common the introduct the discussion just has a lot more about what the results mean and why they're important but this start off by you know why is your study and important and what did it yield so they write to the best of our knowledge a mass fingerprinting approach using MLD tof has not been performed to analyze kimchi samples you're comparing your study to other studies why is your study better why is it unique and they do this again the mass spectra of kimchi samples obtained were analyzed using PCA HD and heat maps this is interesting PCA which is a multi variable analysis method has been applied for the discrimination of coffee cocoa wine saffron and honey so you have all these other citations about how it can be used in other similar fermentation food other fermentation studies other foods other methods of discrimination so well your study could be important for a lot of foods and this method has been used a lot of times so it's a good reliable method the author also offers a critique of the study in this case it's more of a justification so because kimchi is a fermented food to discriminate between Chinese and Korean kimchee based on origin samples must be prepared at various formation times so there they're giving reasons why they use these times why they used ten minutes and why they use this method okay it will just move quickly through here another result is PCA scatter plots and explain the significance between of these results to the research the result implied keywords we have keywords in blue by the way useful verbs the result implied that various polymers such as proteins or polysaccharides disappeared or appeared with the amount affected by fermentation process why don't we put this in the results because it's a more general observation it's a more general relationship it's not an exact finding of the experiment of the of the methods also you're going to assess which results were most useful so which of the results used were most useful this one says that the principles component scatter plot of the kimchi samples after four weeks information showed the best discrimination between Chinese group and Korean group as compared with the scatter plots for one two and three so this scatter plot was the most useful and you can go back to the results and see what that what that showed okay and this is the last page they focus on the success of these methods so HCA was found to discriminate successfully right that's the main finding in a main importance of this study based on these results all the kimchi samples clearly successfully clustered into Chinese and Korean groups so you're discussing how this was this the results worked in this case and you're comparing again this study to related research the degradation of polymers with the progress of fermentation has been reported for sourdough and other fermented unsalted soybean paste therefore it can be used for other research and furthermore therefore constructing a database of mass spectra so if another researcher constructs a database that contains the mass spectra and the geographical information this will allow the kimchi samples to be identified within 10 minutes so if you do this this other kind of work you might be able to yield even better results is what they're saying and in their conclusion they really point out why that's important so in the conclusion the conclusion is the same as the discussion right it's just the kind of the final paragraph the new people they why is the study you know such a so good so you're going to indicate extensions and further implications you'll see here so this author focuses on the success of the study to differentiate kimchi samples again Korean kimchi samples were employed for HCA which allowed clear differentiation between Chinese and Korean kimchi groups within 10 minutes so they state clearly this worked HCA worked to differentiate the samples and finally at the very last sentence they say our and our method could be applied to discriminate the origin of other fermented salted vegetables at reduced cost in shorter times I think this the very end of this sentence is a good example of you know telling the researchers why the study is awesome why it rocks because it has a lot of other potential and it could actually affect the economics it could allow researchers to find bacteria in certain kimchi certain cabbage in different locations quicker and cheaper all right it's our discussion quiz which is not a purpose of the discussion section a to explain the results of your study be to critique and justify your methods see to discuss implications and suggest for the research or D to describe how you prepared the materials yes what's one D D again which is not a purpose of discussion to describe how you prepared the materials then go where do you describe how you prepared the materials sir which section do you and the methods yeah all right so don't forget to grab your coupon at the end okay this is the last section and then we're going to discuss the introduction we will discuss some grammar issues quickly and then we'll have a break so hang with me okay so in the last thing you'll do is write the introduction the introduction tells the readers right away what does this study do why is it important and many researchers will tell you in journal journals will tell you introduction is most the most important part as far as getting other researchers interested because if they read the introduction and it's great then they're hooked and that goes with abstract to abstract oh it's very uh very very important to know yeah okay so in this section you should establish the context of the research include gaps in knowledge that your study is going to feel state the purpose of the work give a a hypothesis and or research question and discuss why your approach why you chose this approach and include the main content found in the results and discussion but you're not including the data you're just kind of summer your previewing previewing this results okay so here's some questions what's the problem being solved what do we know about the problem are there existing solutions what what have other researchers showed that we can solve this problem what are the limitations to these solutions what's the problem with the curve understanding and your hypothesis what do you want to do with this study so let's break it down the introduction down to two main questions first what is the gap in knowledge that exists and why it doesn't need filling okay this is going to show you the importance why should people care about your study and to how does this study fill that gap this is the role of the study or the hypothesis really what's the problem how does your study solve that problem so for the introduction has many parts I'd say it's the most complicated of of your paper and that's maybe why you should write it last so you don't miss anything so start with the background information about the topic and this means you're going to talk about the problem next talk about the motivations why did you do the study what are the key primary literature that you used that you can cite that supports your work what's your hypothesis or your research question and what approaches did you use and why okay this is your organization and almost all introductions will be organized like this so let's look at our chart again we have this upside down pyramid shape we start with what is known our understanding of the world what is unknown and how do we fill it our hypothesis oh well just look at a few of these so you want to make sure only use highly relevant sources only use the sources that are closely related to your study right don't use you know Einstein if you're not writing about his exact you know theories of relativity or related theories use key words from your title so in your introduction use use words from your paper title right away and include a clear hypothesis of course we'll continue okay so lets we're gonna look at a different different paper this is not the kimchi paper this is a different paper in the title is targeted therapy database a model to match patients molecular profile with current knowledge so look at the keywords some keywords that they've used in the abstract targeted therapy early diagnosis molecular profile cancer biology so right away in the first paragraph they have used a lot of key words cancer early diagnosis anti cancer treatments I like Euler targeted therapies they've also provided information that explains why it's important so they start off very broad right cancer represents the third leading cause of death worldwide wow that's really broad and it also shows why the study is important then it moves to a little bit narrower early diagnosis continues to offer the best chance for it most tumors okay then it goes even more narrow the efficacy of anti-cancer treatments and it also said it shows why what the problem is they're not satisfactory and then finally you have the most focused the most focused general agreement exists regarding the urgency of developing molecularly targeted therapies so your paper is about about this molecular Lee targeted therapies next you're going to discuss the literature so summarize what researchers knew define key terms okay you this is very important defining the terms when I read a lot of researchers essays they don't define the terms they just write you know s STW and I'm like I don't know what STW means they they don't say where what it means in the introduction you can define it you know write the term and explain what does it mean if it is context specific if it's very basic keep on talking modeling you know then don't have to define it okay give a general review of the primary research literature again not too many details just general okay so we have continuing in the introduction this is still the introduction of the same paper the author defines the term targeted therapy the term targeted therapy includes all those approaches that a more tailor the therapy to the patient and then they have citations right this is a general explanation they haven't discussed every single study it takes too much space they next use primary research to explain the current understanding research on anti-cancer treatment has made several advances so there's a lot of studies that have been done to show how the smart approaches have have increased treatment of certain types of cancer okay we'll skip this but the basic thing is primary literature should be closely related to your study and sources you want to use as many as you can but for a 10 to 15 page paper maybe five to ten sources you also need to cite all of your sources that you list in the references so if you have sort if you listed a bunch of sources at the end you have to use all of them in your paper they're not just sources that you read and we're interested in or they're related you have to use them in the paper okay next you're going to state your statement of purpose and this is a matter of using signal phrases and in our workshop we're going to discuss more about signal phrases and actually these are all signal phrases signal phrases tell the reader what you're going to do what this section is exactly about so use a clear form phrase to introduce your purpose the purpose of this study was to blah blah blah the purpose of the study was to analyze XYZ the objective of this study is to assess the importance of blah blah blah so you have this the purpose the objective what did you do we investigated two possible mechanisms to explain the blahblah okay so this kind of phrases are very basic but they tell the reader where your hypothesis is it should be easy to see where your hypothesis is now here's some key verbs describes investigates lays out presents etc to find the right verb there's not that many of them find the one that works for your study and where it's located is usually placed near the end of the introduction usually as the topic sentence of the final paragraph so the last paragraph of introduction the first sentence will skip this okay let's see an example then so this is an example of our same essay the cancer treatment the objective of this present project is right it's very clear what this author is where their hypothesis is the objective of the present project is to create a manually annotated database and it's one sentence but it can be quite long it's quite a long sentence but you want to put all of the things you're doing in that short sentence one or two sentences lest you may or may not use a an approach rationale a rationale is a justification of why you did the study a certain way a justification of your study design so this usually follows the purpose statement right right after your hypothesis perfect purpose statement you might explain why you did this so you might address why you chose this kind of approach what are the advantages of this particular system this model why why is this technique better than the other studies that you mentioned could look like this if your hypothesis this is your hypothesis given the describe the role of caffeine blah blah blah your rationale might be since the role of non-nuclear p27 in cells was never examined in detail right this is the signal phrase to write since this these studies never did this we were missing we're missing this the way this method of of study here we investigated whether p27 is present in the mitochondria okay so since nobody did this this is why we designed our study like this and because it would help present a new mode of action for caffeine explaining its protective function in the cardiovascular system so you've you've effectively said to your reader oh well this is why we're approaching this way these authors did they approached from the cell wall we're approaching the mitochondria maybe it's bad example okay explain the advantage of your approach alright so there's some mistakes that many authors make in the introduction citing basic scientific knowledge that's really annoying as a reader when I'm I'm a generalist reader right I'm not a biologist I'm not a chemist but when I read basic a study that's not related to it it's if the study is about turtles and you cite research about math about birds that's not related but it's like Oh both turtles and birds are cold-blooded animals I mean it's not important so you don't you're not going to get points for putting that that kind of literature into your introduction it's not relevant don't forget to include citations if you don't cite you are plagiarizing and that's very bad don't forget to define your terms you have to define your terms in the introduction and don't discuss your methods and results right don't discuss them in detail bring them up but don't don't go into great detail all right this is the final quiz before our grammar section when should you write the introduction section a first before the methods B last after the discussion and before the abstract C third after the results and before the discussion or D second after the methods okay you've done one I'm gonna get someone who hasn't done it thank you how about you yeah B last after the discussion before the abstract that's right Wow you guys have got every single one right I don't want to be I feel bad if the next person doesn't get it right but you write you write the introduction last to make sure you capture everything that was in your paper and you're not leaving anything out actually you write the abstract last but of these sections you write the introduction last okay which section usually only uses the past tense and passive voice we we talked about one section in particular the methods results discussion or introduction yes methods good usually I say usually it's not a rule don't leave and say god that guy said we only use passive voice and then you read an article there's active voice all over this stands out because the other sections generally do not use the passive voice so this methods you'll see it it's used more often okay so let's talk now about improving some writing errors some of you if your native English speaker or if you're quite good at English you might be sort of annoyed by some of these but we want to show you some of the biggest mistakes in grammar and yeah grammar issues that writers make so the biggest one you might guess is a determiner misuse a and this that these those so let's just first talk about articles the first thing we're going to talk about is article use article is just a and and dot and I'm gonna give you a little quiz all together too so if you know it you can sleep through this one okay so here's some rules for articles we have uncountable for uncountable nouns these are nouns that cannot be counted right you don't use like water one water two waters three waters just water is not countable so if you have any of the countable noun use the noun with no article for example drinking water has many benefits love is a strong emotion right you don't have any article if you're uncountable noun is one specific noun use the so if you're referring to specific water dull water that water right peace water we examined the water bordering the town which water the water bordering the town and remember to use the in the structure the noun + preposition so the heart of the city the extent of the damage so you can you kind of use this tool to decide whether or not to use an article or of course your editor will fix it for you but we see these these a lot and if you turn it into a journal and you have these issues the editor might question the journal editor my question your research what you don't want okay for uncountable nouns I'm sorry for countable nouns if that noun is one member of the countable noun use a or on with the noun I want a car a virus could have infected this specimen a virus right not that virus but any virus any one of this viruses all members of the noun use the noun with no articles right colors can affect our emotions scientists have been researching this issue and use a plural form to write students are often hungry during class the countable noun as a whole group used the the harp is a difficult instrument so the harp is accountable you can count one harps two harps the harp the cars I'm sorry the car is a difficult thing to fix the elephant is a large animal okay so use this as a tool if you need so let's do a quick quiz which article should you use we have a n daa' or no article how about number one you can just shout it out anybody we analyze a variety of tissue samples two experts identified in Lake surrounding the compound delay as the source of the infection why why is we used uh in this case coming go yeah good in a specific lake if we just said like as the source of all there is no in question just the source of infections then there would be but not need that it's specific and three colors affect our perception of reality are smart okay okay the next one's a bit more complicated I like this one because this is more about style not grammar so a nominalization a nominalization is basically you have taken a noun or you have a meaningless verb and then you have a noun that's been changed to a noun from a verb so you have extra words and it's kind of like not not academic not academic writing so you want to delete the meaningless verb and convert the nominalization to a main verb so let's look at this instead of Joe will conduct research on the impact blah blah blah Joe will research the recent droughts impact on local wildlife it's much shorter and the verb you have one verb research conduct research you have a nominalization which is research here in research is a noun so actually we see this all the time in science writing because science writers like to copy the fifth form which is okay but I think if this is much clearer and more direct if you see many many many nominalizations it can get a bit annoying why do you conduct research you're researching ok the board will make a decision next week about whether to accept or accept you the board will decide next week whether to accept you we don't need to make a decision we can just decide the approval of the plan was given by the committee the committee approved the plan okay their interpretation of the implementation of the Institute's program was insightful instead they insightful II interpreted how the Institute implemented its program Oh both of these give me a headache but second one is much cooler first was their introduction of the analysis of dreams by the trauma patients this kind of thing we see all the time like constantly as editors so if you can try to change it by yourself first they introduced how they analyzed the trauma patients dreams when you are revising your your paper is the time you can change these when you're writing it don't worry about it but when you go back over it look for if see if you have any meaningless verb like conduct or make and see if you can change to a stronger verb so let's try to do these together they reach the conclusion that we should run a new cohort study what's a better way to write this nice they concluded that we should run a cohort study the undertaking of building the new company was complicated by their lack of experience it's a bit it's tough I don't know who who wrote this than the game they lacked experience which complicated how they built the new company so we've split it into two clauses or are we have a or we can say they're inexperienced complicated how they built the new company I like the second one better because complicated is doing more work in the middle their inexperience complicated the predicate okay and last we'll just review past and present tense when to use either we got about a minute before break and then we'll we'll give you ten minutes okay so generally past tense is used in prior research or during the results or observations made in your study prior research Watson asserted that mice and group be developed so these are the actual things you see in the study use the present tense with general facts right grass is green the Earth revolves around the Sun the sky is blue or when it's the subject of the sentence of your paper our study demonstrates when you're talking about your study how it fits in with some of the science you don't use past so you don't say our study limit our study has demonstrated that grass is green our study demonstrates that grass is green our the results showed you can use results as a past past tense conclusion or interpretation of current findings so entropy may be involved in may be involved so let's see some more examples so you'd past tense when referring to prior research the bowling group hypothesized that there would be an increase this actually depends on if you're using APA or or other I believe AMA and APA you will use past tense MLA you you will use present tense when discussing other other words many studies have done throughout the twentieth should be twentieth-century have confirmed this affinity between carbon and nitrogen right studies have confirmed observations tumor cells metastasized upon expand exposure to this chemical I think we need to edit this which is ironic okay present tense okay air pressure decreases with altitude the average human skeleton contains twenty two hundred seventy bones and last if the subject of the sentence is your work the study confirms previous findings our research indicates this is probably the hardest rule to keep in MA to remember when you're writing but you can use these these guidelines and other ones on the internet to sort of check your work before you give it to an editor it's gonna help help a lot in case the editor misses something or just so you understand what you've written the quality of your writing okay how last one sorry comorbidity appears to be a factor the results of past studies are corroborated by this evidence evidence a present tense with the interpretation all right so that's the end of the first section if you have any questions you can ask now but just know during the workshop we will sort of be doing a similar we'll be analysing another research paper but making some changes and then doing some activities but you could ask any questions now

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Keywords: research paper, how to write a research paper, academic writing tips, writing the methods, how to write an introduction, how to write the results, how to write the discussion, grammar tips, manuscript, common verbs for research paper, university research paper, how to write a dissertation, methods, abstract, editing service, essay editing, editing for research papers, wordvice, essay review

Id: cMJWtNDqGzI

Length: 71min 56sec (4316 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 19 2018