Exploring a path that has never been treaded before and letting the world know about your new findings are undoubtedly an amazing achievement in life! And, that is what a research student’s life’s aim is all about. You put all your intelligence and knowledge in conducting research on your chosen topic and cherish the fruit of success at the end. But, this is only the half part of the story and your journey completes when you finally present your research work in written format.  And, to be true, this is the most important part of your research life. 

You must know that writing a research paper is utterly a different experience than writing a thesis or a dissertation. Thesis and dissertation give you the scope to elaborately explain your research work, whereas the research paper needs to be brief and must be written within specified word count. 

There are around 7 types of research papers like Argumentative papers, Analytical papers, Definition papers, Compare and contrast papers, Cause and effect papers, Reports, and Interpretive papers; and the student needs to choose any one amongst these. Generally, a research paper has space for 275-300 words as per the APA 6ed or Harvard style format. 

You must not forget to incorporate a proper introduction to topic, the literature reviews, applied research methods, data analysis, discussions, conclusion and the bibliography. No matter you are writing research paper on what topic, but a proper research paper must include the above mentioned points.

Apart from the aforementioned things, you should also beware of the errors and writing style of your paper. This research paper is the reflection of your knowledge and intelligence, so make sure it is smartly written without any errors. Following are some of the things you should also keep in mind:

• Do a background research to design and understand your experiment
• Create a table with “wh” words to create research questions
• Write-up must be brief and crisp
• Use direct language
• Use error free grammar
• Check the spellings properly
• Proofread it several times
• Conduct contextual literature search
• Use latest references

Academic research writing requires a through and in-depth study of the subject, collection of information from various sources and compilation of data. Today, students will not just sit in the library for long hours to do their research, but they also rely on the internet for online research articles to enhance their knowledge about the subject. Managing the raw materials collected is a mammoth task without proper tools. Here are three tools which will transform the way you have been organizing and managing your online data.

Evernote

Evernote is a versatile free tool which allows you to take notes, collect information in the form of documents, images and PDFs and store them in a single location. It is compatible with your smart phones as well as your computer. So, now you can work either from your smart phone on the way home and can continue working on your computer as the documents will automatically sync. It also allows you to add tags and keywords to the document so that they can be arranged in a particular order.

Evernote: Your online thumbnail.

Diigolet

Diigolet is a researching tool which will allow you to highlight text on webpages with different colors, add sticky notes, bookmark website or share text with friends. This application after installation becomes a part of your toolbar and all your annotated links are saved in its library. This tool is available in both free and paid version.

DIigolet: Your personal online library.

Scrivener

Scrivener is a word processing and project management tool for authors. It is a paid service with a 30 day trial period. It allows you to create sections of your academic paper and arrange them later as per the format and flow of your paper. It also assists in researching and collecting data by allowing you to take notes. After the research is complete, it assists you to build the final paper by using proper formatting including footnotes and creating PDFs, Word, HTML and RTF documents.

Scrivener: your personal writter

Closed access publishing still dominates the publishing world. The system may be bad, and the progress towards open access is a good thing but choosing not to publish your work in the highest impact factor journal can be a career suicide. Many countries explicitly include impact factors of your publications to allocate jobs and grants. You can’t deny that there is a very strong correlation between the impact factor of the journals in which your peers have published and their success in landing jobs and grants. 

But Impact factor alone will not help you in getting a job and grants, even grant review committees ignores the impact of  journal in which you published and focus exclusively on the quality of the science that you do. However, scientists are so conditioned about impact factors that most design their experiments, and write their papers to get their work published into the journal with highest possible impact factor.

High impact publications can make a difference in landing you in to a job or getting you grants, other factors that play into these decisions are letters of recommendation, how effectively you communicate in an interview and, most importantly, the quality of your science.

Getting jobs and grants is a competitive process in which the quality of an individual scientist’s previous work and future plans are evaluated. Getting your paper published generally evaluates your quality work and its overall impact in science and society. It is foolishness to conclude that it is the journal in which your work gets published, rather than the quality of your work that plays the dominant role in determining your success in scientific research.

Many academic articles in almost all fields are never cited, and fields related to plants can never have impact factors as high as those of engineering and technology but still most scientists and academicians, emphasize on bagging the highest impact factor journal for their research work. Therefore while you try to publish your research work in journals with high impact but you should also work upon the quality of your science and personal grooming.