There will come a time when you need to prepare for your research paper. Getting your work published in a peer-reviewed journal is a long process. In fact, writing and publishing a research paper can be one of the most rewarding experiences you may encounter in academics. The following steps provide a simple and effective strategy for preparing a research paper, presentation, or other projects. Depending on your topic and your familiarity with library research, you may need to rearrange or recycle these steps.
No matter a topic is assigned by your instructor or chosen by yourself, state the topic as a question. For example, if you are interested in finding out the relationship between corporate governance and company performance, you may pose the question, "How does corporate governance affect the company performance?"
Identify the main concepts or related keywords in your question (e.g. shareholder right, proxy, rating, equity prices, etc). Look up these keywords in subject encyclopedias (use Library Catalog) or magazines. Read the articles in these sources to set the context of your research. The main objective is to give yourself some ideas of which area to explore in your paper. Note any relevant items in the bibliographies at the end of the encyclopedia articles.
Refine your topic by choosing a focus or point of view if necessary. Often, you start with a general topic and need to narrow it down. Occasionally you may need to broaden your topic.
In addition to full-text journal databases such as ProQuest and EBSCOhost, you can also use periodical indexes and abstract databases (e.g. Web of Science, Scopus, ERIC, EconLit, Google Scholar) to search for articles. If the full text is not linked in the index you are using, try FIND@HKUST which is a link resolver that helps you to locate the full-text in other sources. If the full-text article is not available in our Library, submit an online interlibrary loan request to us.
During your research process, you may end up getting a lot of reading materials. It is crucial to evaluate the information you collected. The general criteria used to evaluate the source (print or online) are:
In addition to authority, objectivity and currency, bibliometrics such as citation counts and h-index are widely used in research evaluation, and these metrics are available on Web of Science and Scopus (see Bibliometrics) .
When you are ready to write, create an annotated list/bibliography of readings to help you organize, format and write your paper.
Writing a good research paper is a challenging task, consult with your language instructors. RPG writing workshops are also offered by the Center for Language Education in both Fall and Spring semester.
