Writing the Research Paper: A Review

6 College & Research Libraries receives over a 100 submissions each year; approximately 30% are accepted. What follows are a few observations and tips for planning and writing a research paper that may be beneficial to potential authors. A common weakness is the omission of the problem statement. In the problem statement, provide the reader with the context for the research, clarify the focus of the research that you have performed, explain the gap in knowledge that your research is designed to fill, and describe why the research and results are important to the field. Clarity and succinctness are characteristics of good problem statements. A more complete discussion of problem statements appears in a 2007 editorial written by Hernon and Swartz for Library & Information Science Research.1 The literature review is another component of research submissions. A well-done literature review benefits both the researcher and reader. The process of doing the review gives the researcher a thorough grounding of the subject matter. It helps refine issues and determine whether others have tried to answer the question(s) under consideration. If there are others who have looked at similar questions, the literature review will reveal the perspectives they took and the methods they used. It will also inform the researcher of the strengths and weaknesses of those methods. Through the literature review, you provide the reader with more of the context for the research, and show how your research fits in with other research on the topic. It is in this section that you help the reader understand the basis for decisions of focus, and method. “Literature reviews identify, classify, and explain the most important scholarly answers to important research questions.”2 Writing the Research Paper: A Review