Writing a Good Research Paper

A research paper is a paper for which you must locate and examine information from relevant authorities on a specific topic or question. I might sometimes indicate the specific sources to be used in the wording of the assignment. More commonly, though, I will not do this; you will be expected to identify and find relevant resources on your own.

Like the other papers assigned in my classes, research papers are thesis defence papers. However, unlike a standard philosophy essay, a research paper does not necessarily involve defending your own position on a question, or require the consideration of possible objections to your position. The purpose of a research paper is to convince a reader that you have adequately surveyed authoritative views published on an issue. The quality of your defence, therefore, rests on the relevance and authority of the sources that you cite. You must not only adequately describe the issue in your own words (ISSUE component), you must also provide information that will allow a reader to understand why any supporting sources you cite are relevant and authoritative on the issue in question (the ARG component). Finally, you must be meticulous about presenting the necessary details concerning your citations so that the reader can verify you research (the REF component). Thus, I use the following mark scheme to grade research papers:

How many citations should you provide? There is no simple answer to that question.

To do well on the assignment you should at least provide 3 quotations like those discussed in more detail on my research examples page. These quotations should be drawn from at least three different relevant sources. In brief, one of the citations should provide some help in understanding the issue, such as providing information about key concepts, authorities or major contending positions on the issue, and the other two should provide details about at least two of these contending positions. However, depending on the word limit of the assignment and the complexity of the issue it might be necessary to include more sources.

A research paper normally sandwiches the body of the paper between an introduction and a closing paragraph, as most other kinds of papers do. However, there is an additional mandatory part to a research paper. You must have a final page or set of pages that is titled “Works Cited” or “Bibliography.” A bibliography displays citation information for each source to which you refer in your paper. One standard way to record such information for different kinds of documents is explained in my citations examples page. Never include references from materials for which you cannot at least supply an author (or organization as ‘author’), title, and date of publication. For electronic sources the date of publication is not equivalent to the date that you accessed the information, but must refer to a date included within the accessed material itself that indicates when it was originally posted or last updated. Similarly, electronic documents must have titles internal to the document itself. A web address (URL) is not acceptable as a title.