How to Write a Research Paper: The Steps, and When to Do Them

Getting assigned a research paper feels different from getting assigned an essay, and it should. It's longer, it comes with formatting rules nobody has ever explained to you, and somewhere in it you're supposed to sound like you know the field.

So most of us do the same thing. We read the assignment sheet, pick a rough topic, tell ourselves we'll start properly at the weekend, and then open nine tabs and close all of them.

The problem usually isn't effort. Almost every guide gives you the same eight steps in the same order, and almost none of them tells you when to do which one. A list of steps still leaves you staring at a Tuesday night with no idea what tonight is for.

So this guide is built around the calendar as much as the steps. It covers:

• what a research paper has to do, and how long it should be

• a schedule counted backward from your due date

• how to narrow a topic until you can finish it

• how to tell a source that will hold up from one that won't

• what the finished paper looks like in MLA and APA

What a Research Paper Is

A research paper is an argument you build out of other people's published work, and that one line explains most of the rules that come with it.

That's the difference from every essay you've written before. An essay can run on your own reasoning from the first line to the last, and a research paper can't.

Your job is to gather what has already been established, arrange it, and say what it adds up to that nobody quite said in those words.

This is why the citations aren't decoration you add at the end to satisfy a rule. They are the evidence. A research paper with no sources is an opinion piece with a bibliography stapled on.

It also explains the grading. You aren't being graded on having an original idea nobody has ever had. You're being graded on whether you found the right material, understood it, and put it together into something that holds.

How long? Whatever the sheet says. A first-year class paper usually runs 5 to 10 pages and an upper-level seminar paper 15 to 25, but the sheet outranks any number in any guide, including this one.

Read the Assignment Sheet Like a Grading Rubric

Because that's what it is. Most of what you'll lose points on is written down in advance, and most students read the sheet once, in the first week, before the topic means anything to them.

Read it again now, with a pen, and pull out the things that are rules:

• The question. Are you being asked to argue a position, compare two things, or review what's known? Those are three different papers, and picking the wrong one costs you more than any writing mistake will.

• Length, and whether it's pages or words. Word counts are the honest ones. Page counts move with font and spacing.

• The citation style. MLA, APA or Chicago changes your title page, your headings and your bibliography. Finding out in week three is cheap. Finding out the night before isn't.

• Source requirements. How many, and what kind. Some sheets require peer-reviewed articles and quietly rule out most of what a web search returns.

• The due date and the submission method. A file type or a portal you've never used is worth testing before the last hour.

If the sheet includes a rubric, that rubric is the outline of your grade. Copy it into a document and check the paper against it before you submit, not after you get it back.

The Schedule, Counted Backward From the Due Date

This is the part almost no guide gives you. The University of Wisconsin's own writing handbook lists realistic scheduling among the things it doesn't cover, and it isn't alone.

So the table below counts in days remaining, not in steps. It assumes a two-week window, which is the common case for a class paper. Compress it proportionally if you have less, and do not compress the last two rows.

Two things about this schedule are deliberate. The draft gets three days and the revision gets two, because the draft isn't the hard part. And the introduction is written on day two, not day fourteen, for the reason in the FAQ below.

If the plan is fine and the evening blocks are what fall apart, that's a different problem. Our guide to time management for students covers building the blocks, and the piece on procrastination and how to fix it covers the part where you don't start.

Pick a Topic You Can Finish

A good research topic is narrow enough to cover properly in the length you were given, and broad enough that people have already written about it.

Most bad topics fail on one of those two. "Social media" is a book, not a ten-page paper. "The effect of one specific app on one specific dorm floor" has no literature behind it, so you'll spend four days discovering there's nothing to cite.

The narrowing move is to add constraints until the question stops being a category and starts being a question. Who, where, when, compared to what.

• Too broad: climate change and agriculture

• Getting there: drought and crop yields in the American Midwest

• A paper: how Midwest corn yields responded to the 2012 drought, and what that suggests about irrigation policy

If you're staring at a blank page, start from a list instead. Our 240 research topics for college students is sorted by subject and includes a section on turning one of them into a research question, which is the step that matters.

One test before you commit: search your topic and see whether you find four or five sources in twenty minutes. If you can't, the topic is wrong, not the library.

Find Sources That Will Hold Up

Start at your library, not at a search engine. Every US college pays for databases you already have access to, and the material inside them is the material your instructor expects to see cited.

• Your library's databases. JSTOR, EBSCO, ProQuest and the subject-specific ones. Log in through the library site so the paywalls open.

• Google Scholar. Good for finding a paper, less good for reading it. Take the title back to your library.

• The reference list of a good source. The fastest trick in research. One strong recent article gives you fifteen more, already vetted by someone who knew the field.

• Wikipedia, for orientation only. Read it to learn the vocabulary of a topic, then scroll to the references and go read those. Do not cite the article itself.

Collect more than you need, and collect the citation at the same moment you collect the source.

Going back to find where a quote came from, three days later, at midnight, is the single most avoidable hour in this whole process. A note-taking app that holds a link next to the note is enough.

The Five Questions That Kill a Bad Source

The standard tool for this is the CRAAP test, written by a librarian at California State University, Chico, and now used by university libraries worldwide. Five questions, and a source that fails one badly is usually not worth defending.

1. Currency. When was it published, and does that matter here? A 1994 source is fine for a historical argument and useless for anything about technology.

2. Relevance. Does it address your question, or a neighboring one? Written for whom, at what level?

3. Authority. Who wrote it, what are their credentials, who published it, and did it pass peer review or any fact-checking at all?

4. Accuracy. Is the evidence there, and can you follow it back? Claims with no sources under them are opinions in a serious font.

5. Purpose. Why does this exist? To inform, to sell, to persuade, to entertain? A page that wants your money isn't disqualified, but it isn't neutral either.

The one students skip is purpose, and it's the one that catches the most. An industry group's report on its own industry can be accurate, current, authoritative and still be an advertisement.

Write the Thesis, Then Try to Break It

Your thesis is one sentence that says what the paper argues. Not what it's about. What it argues.

• A topic. This paper examines the effects of the 2012 Midwest drought on corn yields.

• A thesis. The 2012 drought cut Midwest corn yields less than rainfall alone predicts, because irrigation infrastructure built in the previous decade absorbed part of the shock.

The second one commits to something. Somebody could disagree with it. That's the test.

Once you have a candidate, spend ten minutes trying to argue the opposite. If you can't find anything to say against it, it's probably too obvious to be worth a paper. If you find a great deal to say against it and no way to answer, you need a different thesis or more reading.

Write it at the top of your outline and leave it visible. Every section you write afterwards has to answer the same question: does this serve that sentence?

The Outline That Turns Into the Paper

An outline isn't a list of topics. It's a list of claims, each with the evidence attached, in the order you'll make them.

Give every section three things and the drafting stops being frightening:

• The claim. One sentence, in your own words.

• The sources. Which ones support it, with the page numbers you flagged while reading.

• The link. Why this section comes after the one before it.

Any section where you can't fill in the second line doesn't have evidence yet. That's worth knowing on day six rather than day two.

Standard shape for a class paper: introduction, background or literature, then your sections of argument in the order that builds, then the counterargument you deal with honestly, then the conclusion.

Papers in the sciences may want a methods and results structure instead, and the sheet will say so.

What a Research Paper Looks Like

This is the part students search for at 1 AM the night before, and most guides push it to a separate page. The rules below are MLA and APA as Purdue OWL documents them, and the APA column is the student paper version, which differs from the professional one.

Two details cost more marks than they should. In MLA there's normally no title page, so adding one because it looks finished can count against you.

And in APA a student paper doesn't carry a running head, which is the single most common thing students copy from an older template. The full rules for both live at Purdue OWL for MLA and for APA.

Set the formatting up before you draft, not after. Fixing spacing and headings on a finished twenty-page document is an hour you won't have.

Writing the Draft

Write the body first and the introduction last. This one instruction saves more time than everything else on this page.

The introduction has to promise exactly what the paper delivers, and you don't know what it delivers until it exists. Starting there's how people spend a whole evening on a paragraph they later delete.

• Start with the section you're surest of. Momentum is easier to keep than to find, and nothing says you have to write in order.

• Leave gaps rather than stopping. Write [CHECK] or [SOURCE?] and keep going. Breaking flow to hunt a page number costs twenty minutes every time.

• One claim per paragraph. If a paragraph is doing two jobs, it's two paragraphs.

• Quote sparingly, paraphrase mostly. A paper stitched from block quotes reads as though you had nothing to add. Quote when the exact wording is the point.

Expect the first draft to be bad, because a first draft is only there to give you something to fix. The study techniques that work apply here too: short focused sessions beat one long grind, and the work goes better spread across days than piled into one.

Cite as You Go

Every time you use somebody else's idea, finding, wording or data, it gets a citation. Not just direct quotes.

The rule students get wrong is paraphrasing. Rewriting someone's sentence in your own words still needs the citation, because the idea is still theirs. Changing the words doesn't change the ownership.

• Cite while you write, never after. Retrofitting citations into a finished paper is where accidental plagiarism happens.

• Keep the page number with the note. At the moment you take the note, not later.

• Let a citation tool do the formatting, then check it. Generators get author order, edition and capitalization wrong often enough that a spot check is worth the two minutes.

• When you're unsure, cite. An unnecessary citation costs you nothing. A missing one is an academic integrity case.

Revise in Three Passes, Not One

Reading a paper once and fixing whatever you notice isn't revision. You'll catch typos and miss the fact that section four argues against section two.

Three passes, each looking for one thing only:

1. Argument. Does every section serve the thesis? Is anything missing, and is anything here that shouldn't be? Cut the section you like most if it doesn't belong.

2. Paragraphs. Does each one make a single claim, support it, and hand off to the next? Most papers get fixed on this pass rather than the other two.

3. Sentences. Now the wording, the citations, the formatting and the typos. Last, because there's no point polishing a paragraph you might delete.

Then read it out loud. It's the cheapest editing tool there is, and your ear catches things your eye has stopped seeing.

If your campus has a writing center, this is the point to book it, and the UW-Madison handbook and your own library's research guide are both good models for what that appointment can cover.

Frequently Asked Questions

How long should a research paper be?

Whatever the assignment sheet says, and nothing else decides it. A first-year class paper usually runs 5 to 10 pages, an upper-level seminar paper 15 to 25. If the sheet gives a word count instead of a page count, use the word count, because font and spacing change page counts and word counts don't.

How is a research paper different from an essay?

An essay can run on your own reasoning from start to finish. A research paper has to run on other people's published work, and your job is to arrange that work into an argument and say what it adds up to. It's why the citations aren't decoration. They're the evidence itself.

How many sources do I need?

The sheet usually says. When it doesn't, a rough working number is one solid source per page of writing, weighted toward the argument rather than spread evenly. Ten thin sources you skimmed are worth less than five you read properly.

Can I use Wikipedia?

Not as a citation, but yes as a starting point. Read the article to get oriented, then scroll to the reference list at the bottom and go read those. That's where the citable material is, and it's one of the fastest ways to find real sources on a topic you know nothing about.

What if I can't find enough sources?

That's almost always a topic problem, not a library problem. A question that's too narrow, too new, or too local won't have a literature behind it. Widen the question by one step and search again before you assume the material doesn't exist.

Should I write the introduction first?

Write it last, or write a placeholder and replace it. The introduction has to promise exactly what the paper delivers, and you don't know what the paper delivers until it exists. Most people who start with the introduction spend an hour on a paragraph they end up deleting.

MLA or APA, how do I know which one to use?

Your instructor or your department decides. As a rough map, MLA is the humanities, APA is psychology, education and the social sciences, and Chicago covers history and some fine arts. If the sheet doesn't say, ask, because reformatting a finished paper is a miserable evening.

The Short Version

Read the sheet like a rubric. Count backward from the due date instead of forward from today. Narrow the topic until it's a question. Collect the citation at the same moment as the source. Write the body before the introduction. Revise three times, for three different things.

None of that's clever. It's just the order that works, and the order is most of the job.