How Does A Research Paper Look

Remember that your audience is the broader scientific community, not the other students in your class or your professor.Therefore, you should assume they have a basic understanding of psychology, but you need to provide them with the complete information necessary for them to understand the research you are presenting.

The Method section typically includes Participants, Materials and/or Apparatus, and Procedure sections.

If the design is particularly complicated (multiple IVs in a factorial experiment, for example), you might also include a separate Design subsection or have a “Design and Procedure” section.

The introduction of an APA-style paper is the most difficult to write. Your intro should be a logical flow of ideas that leads up to your hypothesis.

A good introduction will summarize, integrate, and critically evaluate the empirical knowledge in the relevant area(s) in a way that sets the stage for your study and why you conducted it. Try to organize it in terms of the rather than who did what when.

Note that in some studies (e.g., questionnaire studies in which there are many measures to describe but the procedure is brief), it may be more useful to present the Procedure section prior to the Materials section rather than after it. (e.g., money, extra credit points) Write for a broad audience. 280...” Rather, write (for instance), “Students in a psychological statistics and research methods course at a small liberal arts college….” Try to avoid short, choppy sentences.

Total number of participants (# women, # men), age range, mean and SD for age, racial/ethnic composition (if applicable), population type (e.g., college students). Combine information into a longer sentence when possible.

The hypotheses should flow logically out of everything that’s been presented, so that the reader has the sense of, “Of course.

This hypothesis makes complete sense, given all the other research that was presented.” When incorporating references into your intro, you do not necessarily need to describe every single study in complete detail, particularly if different studies use similar methodologies.

It should be obvious to the reader why you’re including a reference without your explicitly saying so.

DO NOT quote from the articles, instead paraphrase by putting the information in your own words.