Writing a journal article or thesis is a big project. It can feel overwhelming – where to begin?! Focusing on your research questions provides a roadmap – they will guide the Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion sections of your paper:
- Ask your research questions
- Present the results
- Discuss your findings
- Introduce your research
- State your study contribution
- Write the title and abstract
Each of these steps may take some time to carry out – scientific writing is a lot of hard thinking work. You might even cycle through the steps more than once, refining your research questions or adjusting your analysis as you go. Totally normal! Papers are rarely written in one go.
Tips: (1) before you start writing, prepare your writing project by creating a research overview; and (2) don’t forget to ask for feedback from your supervisors and co-author throughout the writing. They can help you identify blind spots and keep you on the right track.
1. Ask your research questions
The key to writing a good paper lies in its questions. Questions provide guidance – they tell you what to focus on and what is less relevant.
Good questions are balanced. If they are too broad, you need an entire book to answer the questions. If they’re too narrow, it will be impossible to write an interesting discussion – you’d just end up restating your results.
2. Present the results
In the Results section, you first start addressing the research questions. While it’s impossible to answer the questions in their entirety (if you can, your question is too narrow), you can use your data to shine light on them.
As the data is often highly specific, the link between the research questions and the data might not be obvious. To fix this conceptual gap, you can use sub-questions to link the research questions to the datasets you collected.
2.5 Describe the methods
The Methods need to explain how each datapoint presented in the paper was obtained, and once you know which results you’re presenting in your paper, you can describe the methods (you could also write them at a later moment – as long as they’re clear and complete).
3. Discuss your findings
A good research paper doesn’t just present the results, but also interprets them. In other words, it explains what these findings mean for the understanding of the system you’re studying.
To interpret the results, you need to argue how your findings change the current state of knowledge (i.e. the literature) – by answering the research questions. Here’s how that works in practice:
- Form a conclusion that answers the research question.
- Present evidence (your results and the literature) that supports this conclusion.
- Address potential objections – such as opposing literature, or study assumptions – to strengthen your conclusion.
- If you cannot address the objections, update the conclusion accordingly. These objections become study limitations – questions that could not be answered within the current study. Suggest solutions to address these questions in future studies.
By following these steps, you are basically developing the arguments that form your discussion section.
4. Introduce your research
A good introduction is key to hook the right audience. It’s important that you know who your reader is – what journal are you writing for? You have to match the journal’s aims and scope to the way you frame your research. If they care about sustainability, that should be at the forefront of your introduction.
In the Introduction, you need to convince the reader that your research is relevant for them. You can do this by explaining why the research matters (e.g. societal relevance: “we want to know how to improve xyz”; knowledge gap: “we don’t know how x affects y”) and what they can expect to learn from this paper (study aims and scope).
5. State your study contribution
Also known as implications, the study contribution explains what your research contributes to the understanding of the system you’re studying. This contribution is rather broad, and links to the broad relevance in your Introduction (e.g. sustainability).
You describe the study contribution by explaining what your main findings/conclusions mean for e.g. policy, applications, or the broader research field.
6. Write a title and abstract
Finally, don’t forget the title and abstract—they’re the first thing readers see, so make them count. These two are easiest to write last, and should accurately reflect the contents of the paper. If you come up with something new while writing the abstract, make sure it’s also clearly stated in the main text.
And that’s all! Those are all the steps needed to write a paper. Remember that writing is iterative – you will likely need a few more drafts to get to a finished manuscript. But in short, following these steps will help you towards a decent first draft!