A profound explanation of what research paper is, what qualifies for academic topic, and why being good in research is so important in our academic career and future life.
Research paper is normally defined as a paper that presents an original approach to some academic topic, organized around a central thesis using insights based on research, and citing sources in a scholarly fashion.
What is a college research paper, and what does your teacher have in mind in asking you to create one?
Research paper is normally defined as a paper that:
- presents an original approach to some academic topic,
- organized around a central thesis,
- using insights based on research,
- and citing sources in a scholarly fashion.
Let's take that definition and consider it point by point, because each element is important. First, a research paper is an original approach to some academic topic. Let's start with the last part of that phrase. An academic topic is a topic studied in schools by university professors and by scholars, around which a discipline and a body of literature have grown up. So you can see that research paper is different from other kinds of writing that you may do for school. Your own life isn't an academic topic so a story that you write about your own experience wouldn't qualify as a research paper. Neither are your opinions about music or current events, or your philosophy of life, or an imaginary narrative that you might write in a form of a story or a screenplay. So any of these kinds of writing which you might be asked to do in some classes or school would not qualify as a research paper.
An original approach means that research paper doesn't just repeat information from other sources. Sometimes students make that mistake. They are so preoccupied with the idea of how to make their material based on research that they forget that their own approach, their own ideas are at least as important. It's not just repeating the material that was written by someone else. It's about giving your own spin. So a research paper should offer your ideas about the topic or furthermore, personal opinions, reactions or conclusions that grow out of academic topic.
Now we also said in our definition that a research paper is organized around a central thesis. What does this mean? Well, your central thesis is the main idea that anchors your paper. It states what you want to say about the topic. The big idea that you've come up with after reading and thinking about the topic. In a good research paper, every fact or idea that's mentioned has some relations to this central thesis. It may help to explain it, to clarify it, to support it, to challenge it, to amplify it, to elaborate it or to suggest its importance. Everything that's in the paper ought to fit in the central thesis in some way. That will give you a well-organized and unified paper.
Now, the next part of our definition says that research paper is written using insights based on research. Now, what's research? Well, research means reading and study of various kinds of evidence, mainly but not exclusively drawn from written materials. Research may be based on all kinds of source materials. There are some examples of kinds of materials that can be included under the general name of research sources. Research may be based on printed materials such as books, scholarly journals, magazines, and newspapers. It may be based on written materials that are not printed, such as unpublished diaries, court records, government records, or notes of scientist or a reporter. Research may be based on spoken materials such as face-to-face interview that you do with someone, or a recording of a speech, lecture, concert, and broadcast. Research may be based on visual materials such as photographs, drawings, paintings (or other works of art), maps, diagrams, graphs, charts or tables. And of course nowadays research may be based on digital documents, especially materials on the Internet, including web pages, digitized books and articles, online publications, or blogs.
Now, what do all these sources have in common? They contain the information of various kinds, and when you write a research paper, you're practicing the skill of gathering information, analyzing it, sorting it, drawing conclusions from it and explaining and demonstrating those conclusions in written form. And that's what creating a research paper is all about. And all of this, all of these processes add up to something called scholarship.
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