Like the literature review paper, you will be required to select a research question or topic and conduct library and/or Internet research regarding scholarly work. However, you will go one step further and conduct your own original research on the topic. This is where you will do what most scientists do: formulate and test hypotheses, use research methods to collect data, complete a quantitative or qualitative analysis of the data collected, and provide conclusions that link your data to the theoretical arguments you discussed in your literature review. In general, this paper will include the following sections: (a) Introduction, (b) Literature Review, (c) Methods Description, (d) Results (data analysis section), (e) Discussions and Conclusions, and (f) References. Usually you will complete a paper like this during your Research Methods and/or Senior Seminar courses. Finally, just like the literature review paper, you will have to use an established citation and reference style. The links below, to already published papers, are good examples of how to do this.
