Researching & Study Skills

Academic research and paper writing is how scientists, researchers and students publish their work; they can often be written in a hard-to-read way or not make sense to a general audience. This isn’t to catch you out or gate keep knowledge, but it may end up dissuading many from worth-while insights.

Here’s some tips to get you on your way:

Abstract?

Information in many cases is summarised in an abstract- a useful tool to describe a point in far fewer words, conveniently displayed near the start of the page your looking at.

How to Begin

To start researching think about what you want to know.

Literature Review

Truly academic research provides a service or fills a niche in society’s knowledge.

An approach to quickly digest the many documents, books and reports is to break them down into manageable points-

  • Topic- What is the main idea the piece or extract is trying to carry?

  • Influence and Inspiration- what are the prime sources the writing draws from? Who influenced the work and why?

  • Evaluation- are there weaknesses found in the writing? Is the work outdated or pushing its own agenda?

  • Application- Where will this new information help people? does the writing make points that feel fresh or are they ‘parroting’ the work of others?

Methodology

The Methodology is the means in which your research is discovered. Trying to look at varied sources:

  • primary and secondary data- Primary data is discovered by the group writing the work, where as Secondary data is sourced from another’s work. It may be the case that the source is referencing another source, who themselves are referencing another and so on.

  • Who they were written by? When was it written and is it outdated? Can they can be trusted to speak about this topic?

Presentation

You may need to present your research in a number of different formats from a simple report to a large poster. in these cases clarity is especially important. Many things must be considered including fonts, character size, colour (primary and complementary), composition and balance, etc. some of these ideas are intuitive- but others such as ‘balance and composition’ take time and patience to master. And remember- even some academics struggle with these concepts.

At the end of a piece of work a conclusion reviews your findings and summarises key ideas. Recommendations are also common parts of conclusions; they comment on where researchers (and the industry as a hole) currently sit on an idea, and how they could further develop upon your research. If presenting your research within an educations setting, these may be mandatory.

Referencing

Citations are required within the text to attribute information to the source and prevent suspected plagiarism.

Further References are placed near the end of the piece to expand on the citations. This may instead include a bibliography that refers to sources that weren’t directly used in the piece- but used to inform the researcher on the topics covered.

The most popular and widely regarded format for references is called ‘Harvard’ after the American University. Others like ‘Oxford’ and ‘APA’ also exist but less common in newer research.

Harvard Referencing convention loosely follows this format-

Citation- (Surname/ Title, Date, Page no.)

Reference- Full name, Date, Title, Location, Publisher

Acknowledgements

Somewhere close to the bottom many papers and academic works take the time to thank the staff team around them, contributors to the work, as well as those who may have funded the research.

References

  • P. Tunnicliffe (October 2020), Research and Researching, University of Derby.

  • Royal Literary Fund (2025), ‘What is a literature review?’

  • Sheffield Hallam University (2025), ‘Methodology and Methods’.

  • A.E. Shamoo & D.B. Resnik (2003), Responsible Conduct of Research, Northern Illinois University

  • American Journal Experts (2022), Implications or Recommendations in Research