STRUCTURE OF A RESEARCH PAPER

Lessons 15-16: Structure of the research report or paper

Problem questions:

1) What is the structure of a research paper?

2) What does IMRD stand for?

3) What are the key features of each aspect of a research paper structure?

4) What is included into introduction?

5) What is S-P-S-E structure?

STRUCTURE OF A RESEARCH PAPER

Practice 1: Answer the questions (5 m)

1) What is a research paper?

2) The most common structure of a research report, а thesis or а research article is referred to as IMRD. Can you guess the meaning of this abbreviation? (Introduction, Method, Results and Discussion).

In the social sciences especially, the literature review is considered so important that (rather than being part of the Introduction) it is given а section to itself.

Practice 2: What are the key features of each aspect of а research paper structure? Try to complete the missing information (5 m)

Introduction: _______________________________________________________________

Mapping of the field (in some disciplines, there will also be а literature review)

Identifying а research 'gap'

Making а claim about needed research

Giving some idea of the MRD approach that will be used

Method__________________________________________________________________

Answering: How will this research be done? With what materials or subjects? How many? etc.

Working according to the principles of Clarity and Reality

Using the Relevance principle to dictate the amount of detail to use

Results _____________________________________________________________________

Answering: What happened? Why? How sure can I be of the meaning of these results?

Working according to the principles of Honesty and Reality

Discussion____________________________________________________________________

This is probably the single most important part of the report, since it is here that you demonstrate that you understand and can interpret what you have done.

Task 3: Recognising the structure of a research paper (10m)

Read the research article (below) entitled Free online availability substantially increases a paper's impact by Steve Lawrence, NEC Research Institute, Princeton, NJ, USA, lawrence@research.nj.nec.com. See whether you can find paragraphs of the text that generally deal with each of the key IMRD areas. Circle either I, M, R, or D for each of the paragraphs.

1 The volume of scientific literature far exceeds the ability of scientists to identify and use all relevant information. The ability to locate relevant research quickly will dramatically improve communication and scientific progress. Although availability varies greatly by discipline, more than a million research articles are now freely available on the web.

2 Here we investigate the impact of free online availability by analysing citation rates. Online availability of an article may not greatly improve access and impact without efficient and comprehensive search services; a substantial percentage of the literature needs to be indexed by these search services before scientists consider them useful. In computer science, a substantial percentage of the literature is online and available through search engines such as Google, or specialized services such as Researchlndex - although the greatest impact of online availability is yet to come, because comprehensive search services and more powerful search methods have become available only recently.

3 We analysed 119,924 conference articles in computer science and related disciplines, obtained from DBLP (dblp.uni-trier.de). In these fields, conference articles are typically formal publications and are often more prestigious than journal articles, with acceptance rates at some conferences below 10%. We estimated citation counts and online availability using ResearchIndex, excludmg self-citations.

4 Figure 1 shows the probability that an article is freely available online as a function of the number of citations to the article, and the year of publication of the article. The results are dramatic, showing a dear correlation between the number of times an article is cited and the probability that the article is online. More highly cited articles, and more recent articles, are significantly more likely to be online, in computer science. The mean number of citations to offline articles is 2.74, and the mean number of citations to online articles is 7.03, an increase of 157%.

5 We analysed differences within publication venues (the conference for a particular year, for example), looking at the percentage increase in citation rates for online articles. When offline articles were more highly cited, we used the negative of the percentage increase for offline hence if the average number of citations for offline articles is two, and the average for online articles is four, percentage increase would be 100%. For the opposite situation, the percentage increase would be -100%.

6 Averaging the percentage increase across 1,494 venues containing at least five offline and five online articles results in an average of 336% (median 158%) more citations to online computer-science articles compared with offline articles published in the same venue (see Figure 2).

The graph shows the distribution of the percentage increase for the average number of citations to online articles compared to offline articles. The analysis covers 1,494 publication venues containing at least 5 online and 5 offline articles. For 90% of venues, online articles are more highly cited on average. On average there are 336% more citations to online articles compared to venue [the first, second (median), and third quartiles of the distribution are 58%,158%, and 361%].

7 If we assume that articles published in the same venue are of similar quality, then the analysis by venue suggests that online articles are more highly cited because of their easier availability. This assumption is likely to be more valid for top-tier conferences with very high acceptance standards. Restricting our analysis to the top 20 publication venues by average citation rate gives an increase of 286% (median 284%) in the citation rate for online articles.

8 Free online availability facilitates access in many ways, including provision of online archives; direct connections among scientists or research groups; hassle-free links from e-mail, discussion groups and other services; indexing by web search engines; and the creation of third-part search services. Free online availability of scientific literature offers substantial benefits to science and society. To maximize impact, minimize redundancy and speed scientific progress, authors and publishers should aim to make research easy to access.

http://www.nature.com/nature/debates/e-access/Articles/lawrence.html 09/09/05

Date: 2016-04-22; view: 1553