How to Write a Research Paper

So, I think I'm almost done with one of the most important topic clusters in my EminentEdit blog—How to Write a Research Paper. How did I go about doing so?

First, let's discuss the importance of this topic in my niche, Academic Writing. In a niche like mine, the main clients would be people who write academic essays and research papers. In short, my clients or potential clients would be:

• Researchers writing papers for journal publication
• Students writing college academic essays
• Master's and PhD students writing their theses/dissertations
• Academics and policymakers writing white papers and briefs

You get the point. From my experience, the first category is the most popular: researchers writing for journal publication. Students writing research papers and their master's thesis come a close second but are subject to seasonal traffic.

Capturing this market is crucial. Therefore, for an academic editing website to work would have to write content for these markets. But they aren't the same.

An article appealing to students writing a research paper won't be the same as one targeting academics who want to write a scientific paper for journal publication. So how to solve it?

Differentiating Research Paper Types

So what's the difference between the types of research papers?

Well, it's big. Scientific papers meant for journal publication follow the scientific process. You're supposed to define the problem. Explain how you will solve it based on hypotheses.

At the heart of this, is the IMRaD process, which stands for Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion.

The same process is true of a master's thesis or a PhD dissertation. However, for academic essays, it's much different.

For college papers, you most of the time just need to write an essay ranging between 1000 to 3000 words. Sometimes it may be an essay with no headings or divisions, such as Introduction, Methods, Results, and Analysis.

I solved the problem by writing two different articles for each cluster. The first was How to Publish a Scientific Paper meant for research scientists. The other was How to Write a Research Paper.

The first cluster is complete and looks like this:

You can check out the articles here. A scientific article is divided into three sections, Front Matter, Body, and Back Matter. See Below:

Front Matter

• How to Write a Title for a Scientific Paper
• How to Write an Abstract
• Highlights (optional)

Body

• How to Write an Introduction
• How to Write the Methods Section
• How to Write the Results Section of a Research Paper
• How to Write the Discussion Section
• How to Write the Conclusion

Back Matter

• How to Write the Acknowledgment
• Declarations
• References

Most of these articles are completed as you can see in the live links. Those with no live links have either not been written or have been included as a subheading within a bigger article. For example, Highlights properly belong in the Abstract, as they are an extension of the abstract.

The second cluster of articles targeting undergrad students is not as tight nor as complete. It is or Should be based on the following article: How to Write Your Research Paper. To be fair, it's not complete.

I'm still working on it. But to cater to the target audience I linked it to the following topics:

1. What is Academic Writing?
2. Types of Academic Writing
3. Hacks to Improve Your Academic Writing
4. 7 Useful Academic Writing Resources
5. How to Write a Thesis Statement
6. Academic vs Professional Writing

These, based on my experience, are the types of topics that the typical undergrad student would be interested in. And my hunch appeared to be right. Especially for Article No. 6: Academic Vs Professional Writing.

I apparently got a backlink from The University of Kansas, according to Wix's Analytics. For the past week, this article has received 239 views all from Kansas. It was posted on August 13, about three weeks ago.

Is the Writing Lab over there using the article as a resource? Is a professor using my article as a reference for their course? Whatever it may be I like it. I guess I'm doing something right.