The research paper is an important and essential part of your education. Researching something involves the experience of finding and processing new information you get your hands on, the research process has become very complex as years have gone by, and the availability of electronic sources has opened up many new avenues of advanced research in a lot of fields. The basic purpose of research doesn’t only include presenting quotations, which in other words shows how you report what other people say, instead the main purpose is to closely analyze, process, and evaluation of the issues you are researching. You should also be ready to take the ownership of the knowledge you have discovered, information that supports what your opinion is. Since extra energy and time is required to write a research paper, one should plan very carefully and accordingly.

The process of research starts with the selection of a topic which is suitable for your course or purpose. The selected topic should let you formulate theories or answer questions through the generation of new ideas. The research paper also needs to have to have a clear thesis statement, purpose and a defined audience. As is the norm, you will start the writing process with your first draft; this draft is likely to be revised more than once so the writer shouldn’t panic if he/she finds errors in it the first time it is read again.

After that you proofread the paper, edit it, and then prepare the research paper’s final copy. It is very important for the research paper to be correctly documented, and the readers should know the sources used in writing the paper. A problem with research papers is that it is very easy to have an incoherent peace of writing due to abundance of information available from several different sources; therefore, it is essential that you revise the paper carefully and check for unity and coherence in the structure of the essay. If any part or sentences strays away from the purpose of your research, then it should be eliminated from the final copy

After you have chosen your topic, you need to decide the resources that will be needed to provide you with the information you are looking for. Most of the research papers written in colleges depend on secondary data and topics on which research has already been done; however some may be based on your experiences, responses, and impressions. Writing advanced research papers will probably need you to accumulate, analyze, and take help from the work of other people. It is also very important to give credit for the ideas that you have taken from someone’s research, and to cite these sources a documentation style should be chosen which is according to your requirements. It doesn’t matter whatever documentation style you select, what is important is that you completely understand the format, and then use it consistently in the research paper.

Since there is an abundance of information available from various sources to aid in the research paper writing process, we should however be careful that all the sources are not equally reliable, accurate, and verifiable. This is a problem faced quite often by writers who use sources from the internet. Consequently, it is the responsibility of the writer to make sure that the sources are authentic and of high quality, and if they serve the purpose of your research. The primary sources you use are basically your imagination, knowledge and experiences you have had over your entire life, even though they might have been influenced by perceptions of the people who came before us, still it is a valuable resource in the process of writing a research paper. However, if you use the sources which are created by others, then you need to give proper references and credit to the source from where you got the information. The very last page of the research paper is called the bibliography, and it lists the sources used in the paper for research purposes.