By: Todd Long
Submitted: 2011-01-12 09:05:27 | Word Count: 638
If you are a student in a college or a university pursuing any course, chances are that you will be required to undertake some research work as part of your coursework, whose findings you will have to give in a research paper.
As you will discover if you take your time to do some preliminary reading before launching into the task of research paper writing, is that the format of the research paper (how you present your work, besides the substance of the work itself) is one of the factors that the committee to which you will be submitting the paper to will look at keenly in determining the grade they award you. Take note, in this regard then, that there have been cases of students whose research papers were very good in terms of substance, but who still ended up getting mediocre grades in overall terms out of poor research paper format choice. The least you can do for yourself then, is to make an effort to understand what the correct format of a research paper is and ensure that you adhere to it in your writing.
Your research papers has to have a title, and depending on the format of writing your instructor favors, a title page too. Proper capitalization is necessary for the title. This proper capitalization, by the way, does not mean putting it all in capitals, but usually just putting the first letter of every 'major' word (except words like 'the,' 'of,' 'and,' and so on) in capital letters. The title needs to be bolded, but not underlined. The title need not be all in quotation marks.
Getting into the body your research paper, you need to ensure that you leave adequate margins all around the work. Margin-less work (which some students surprisingly submit) is a poor reflection on you, and is indeed one of the things that could see you stripped of hard-earned marks.
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The pages of your research papers have to be numbered, and in most cases, the items on the pages numbered too for reference purposes. The Arabic numbering system is preferred for your page numbers. It is sometimes recommended that you write your name and college admission number (student number) in very small print as a 'footer' to all pages in your research paper, to help in putting the pages together should they come apart when in the hands of the other people who will get to use it.
Use a paragraph to express every major logical idea that makes up your research paper. Sometimes, that might mean having one-sentence paragraphs, and that is okay as long as it is a logical paragraph. Incidentally, best practice nowadays is to have the first letters of the paragraph aligned with the document's left margin, with a single extra vertical space between the paragraphs to mark them out.
The typical research papers is typically made up of sections like an introduction (after the title), the table of contents - which might be superfluous for a very short research paper, a 'literature review' section, the main body of the research papers describing the arguments with which you entered into the research, the methods you used in the research and the conclusions you made from the same (with the conclusion typically as a separate section of the research paper); and finally a citations section, which is also referred to as a bibliography, which may in some cases by preceded by a table of images, tables, graphs and so on used in the research papers, as well as a glossary of terms and abbreviations used in the research paper, to come up with a professional-looking piece of work.
The research papers has to be printed in neat white paper, and ideally bound (rather than stapled), to complete the professional look of it.
