Structuring The Research Text Professionally: A Comprehensive Overview

When your scientific research is complete and has to be officially packaged in readable text, there is a crucial task that has to be done first: research paper structuring. The right structure makes your text more convincing to the reader, easily understandable, and also makes the writing process more time-efficient. 

In this article, we will explain the rules of making the structure of a research paper immaculate. We will provide you with all the information you need to write a professional-level text.

The First Glance 👓

When people work on texts that are to be presented to the public sooner or later, they rather often tend to forget to look at what they wrote from the perspective of a reader, or a listener. 

It is very easy to get too engulfed in scientific research, thus completely ignoring the actual readability of all the data presented. You likely can explain every detail to yourself, knowing everything in advance, but the average reader might easily get bored of reading the chaotic mess of different scientific facts.

This is why you should clearly understand the purpose of your work. If you need to share what you have discovered with your fellow scientists you should add only the relevant research data, clean of any ambiguous words. 

On the contrary, when it comes to sharing your discoveries with the general public, you need to explain the obvious things, while constantly underlining how valuable the new data might appear to be, and what benefit can your work bring to the world.

Knowing the purpose of publishing your research will definitely give you insight into how to structure a research paper correctly at any given time.

The Basic Principles 📋

There are things that are essential for every text that is worth reading. No matter what the subject or purpose may be, the human mind works by the same principles when receiving the information it may deem useful. To spark a reader’s interest is one thing, keeping them interested for a long time is much more difficult. This is why the text should be readable, catchy, and informative at the same time.

✔️ Readability

The text should be easy to read, easy to comprehend, and easy to remember. Thus, a good research paper should contain no irrelevant information; your text also should be devoid of unexplained data, since readers in most cases tend to ignore the parts they struggle to understand at first sight.

Keep the difficulty of the content as low as possible, explain everything you want in a clear manner, and try to avoid writing very long, logically undividable parts. Clarity is extremely important for your research text to be widely (and easily) accepted.

✔️ Catchiness

The successful text always attracts attention. Moreover, it conquers people’s minds, settling there to be not only remembered but also to be advised to others. The more positive attention your text gets, the more popular it becomes, sharing the fruits of your scientific labor exponentially.

This is why you should always strive to make the structure of a paper memorable. Begin with a witty title that gets readers intrigued, continue with content that lights up heated discussions, and end with even more questions to keep your readers engaged!

✔️ Informativeness

If you think that a good research work should encourage its readers to dedicate their time to begin their own scientific endeavors, you are absolutely right. And, to make your text a guiding beacon for the explorers of tomorrow it should be informative, accurate, and completely sincere.

All data has to be thoroughly illustrated and proven by trusted scientific sources. Every single fact should be unshakable in terms of trustworthiness, and all the information you obtained experimentally should be explained. Build the narration with logic, and bring all the arguments you feel necessary!

How Should a Research Paper Be Structured⬇️

Juggling knowledge in mind, it is time to define the structure to make your paper successful, and widely accepted by the public. Such text should be divided into sections with different content and different purposes that, together, logically support the narration.

📄 Title

This is an extremely important part of any research text. It has to attract readers, and it should encourage them to cite your article. The correctly crafted title is what leads your research text to success, making it famous, and adding value to your scientific efforts.

🖍️ Introduction

This part provides readers with a brief summary of your research work. Here you have to explain what your text is about, what makes it worth reading, and also what were your objectives when you worked on your research paper, and what goals you tried to achieve.

Background data about the subject of your text also has to be briefly outlined here, to give readers a hint on what scientific sources you use, and what exactly caused you to conduct the research. 

After a reader is encouraged by the title to take a closer look at your work, the introduction greets them with a brief overview of what they are about to read — this is the reason why the introduction should be polite, informative, and entertaining.

📚 Materials and methods

In this part, you need to describe everything that you have used to successfully conduct your research. In this case, it is necessary to correctly refer to sources, indicating the original title, author, and year of writing.

All the methods and procedures implemented should also be thoroughly described. Each method must be used in a reasonable and insightful manner. Also, your research should include analytical data with references to similar-themed research works.

❕ Results

In this part, you should describe the results of your research. Do not repeat here what has already been written in the introduction. Share the new information you managed to find.

Try to avoid definitive statements, no matter how plausible the results of your scientific work are. Be polite and respectful towards other scientists and their achievements. Explain the reasons why the results of your research are scientifically significant, and also how challenging it was to achieve them. 

Also, it would be a great decision to point out study limitations and suggest opportunities for future research. Supporting new studies is always a noble task to undertake.

🤓 References and acknowledgments

Here you have to list all of the sources you use to complete your research and also name everyone who was providing you assistance or guiding you to the new discoveries. It is very important to let readers know what books you read yourself to be able to conduct a successful scientific task. It is also extremely important to let the ones who helped you along the way know that their efforts are not forgotten, by naming them. 

🔢 Tables and figures

This is the last one of the research paper parts, meant to contain additional graphs, tables, images, and anything else you find necessary to attach to your text. Be sure to enumerate all the additional data correctly, to be sure that every reader can easily find them.

The information gathered here dramatically affects the quality of your entire text: the more additional data there is, the more entertaining the whole work becomes. That’s how our mind works: bright pictures always do brighten up the narration.

A Friendly Reminder 🤩

There are also things that are not very obvious, yet rather important for making your text immaculate. Knowing them will let you greatly improve the quality of your text.

First of all, build the narration with logic: one thing should lead to another. Chaotic fireworks of hypotheses and experimentally obtained data that are not linked in readable order to each other is a disaster to read. This is why you should keep everything logically bonded, without skipping any research-related information.

Avoid repeating what you have already written, and keep the narration clean of any non-relevant information and inappropriate words: the text should be easy to read, and it should not bring any negative emotions into the minds of readers. 

Adding some witty quotes to brighten up the narration is a very good thing; adding long stories and scientific data that are completely unrelated to your research is obviously a wrong decision. 

Include more images, graphs, stats, and whatever else media you can create to illustrate the highest possible quality of your research work. The more factual evidence of your success you have captured on tape — the more complete and reliable your research becomes. Besides, as it was already said before, bright pictures always brighten up the narration, making it more readable and entertaining for readers.

Don’t forget to check your text for any flaws when it’s done. There are lots of online services that are able to scan your work in seconds and highlight everything that requires correction. Also, it’s never a bad idea to read the text to make sure that all of the parts of a research paper you have written are placed in the right order: sometimes they need to be reshuffled to make the text easier to read and understand. Check the layout of a research paper you have written for any possible improvements.

In Conclusion 🤍

It is actually a lot easier to write a readable text about things you are aware of. Researching new stuff — of any kind, really — is a much more difficult thing to deal with. And one of the skills is structuring. Structuring a research paper is easier than it seems. We have provided you with all the basic information on creating a well-balanced research article structure, and hope you will succeed in your scientific research, no matter how difficult it may be.