How to Prepare Research Papers?

For people in academic field, it is important to know how to prepare research papers on humanities, social sciences, and pure sciences and technologies.

Though the course curriculums at M Phil and Ph D levels include topics about how to prepare research articles, scholars may pay little attention to the compliance of the relevant style guide.

Include an Abstract

For any research paper, it is compulsory that you include an abstract in between 100-200 words along with keywords for the research topic. Abstract is a brief but original write-up on a topic.

An abstract is required for two reasons.

1 Attract Readers

An abstract is characterized by what the topic is all about, why you wrote the topic, and how it is interesting for the readers. Just by reading the abstract, a reader can understand whether to read the topic in full and whether the topic is worth recording.

2 Indexing

Most of the journals, whether print or online, register or index themselves with libraries or online journal directories. To get indexed, each research topic must have an abstract along with the keywords central to the topic importance. The journal directories catalog the abstracts in the similar way as a book cover. Without an abstract, the research papers would fetch the first few words of the main article topic that most often may mismatch the searched keywords. This will leave bad impact on your papers and lose out the readership.

For further reading on importance of an abstract, see here. 

To read some of the abstract examples, see examples of Abstracts.

Use Citation (Incitation, Endnote, Footnote)

Use citation in your research articles as frequently as possible. Your research topic is an original concept that you have to prove as worthy. Suppose you conceive an idea and write a large paper, say in ten pages or more, without any citation, such a topic will be nothing more than an essay and not a research article.

Citation is a referencing method in the body of articles in addition to bibliography. To validate your idea, you have to insert citation from the exiting works, be they books, journals, newspaper articles, or website materials. By copyright laws, any author or research scholars can quote from any available materials they base their subject on freely without asking for the permission from authors or publishers.

For reading more about citation, see here.

Avoid Plagiarism

Plagiarism is making already published material written by other writers as yours. Avoid this. If you ever use the content or extract from a topic, you are free to use it but quote it. And give due credit to the author you quote in citation and bibliography. Many times, we receive materials, especially research papers and theses that have been borrowed from other writers without proper credit. Some authors think that they can do away with the copied item. But to tell you the truth, many journals, magazines, and publications have plagiarism checker of various kinds and can easily verify the submitted material whether they are original.

To avoid plagiarism, it is better that you use the extract in quotes, give reference to the source material, through primary and secondary sources.

Get digital identifier number

Once you finish a paper, whether you are planning to submit it as a thesis or dissertation to your college or university, or to an anthology or journal, get it registered with a recognized research body. ORCID is such an international organization that register your work and assign digital identifier number. It is free and you can submit it online easily.

For more detail about ORCID, click here.

CLRI is looking for good research paper. It is free to submit and get published with us. Submit here.