When instructors refer to research papers, they may have different assignments in mind. A research paper might present your synthesis of many sources of information about, say, emotional responses to music. Your purpose would be to demonstrate your understanding of various research findings and the ongoing debates emerging from researchers’ investigations.
A research paper might also be a report on the results of an experiment you’ve conducted and on your interpretation of those results; in this case, your research paper would be an empirical study. A research paper could also relate your interpretations to what others in the field have concluded from their own experiments.
Like other scientists, psychologists publish research papers in journals after the papers have undergone rigorous and impartial review by other psychologists (called peer review) to make sure that the scientific process used by the researchers is sound.
Whether published in a journal or written for a college course, research papers based on original experiments have the following standard elements:
the question you want to research and why your question is important
a review of research relevant to your question
your hypotheses (tentative, plausible answers to the research question that your experiment will test) and your predictions that follow from the hypotheses
the method you used to conduct your experiment
the results from the experiment
your analysis of those results
Writers of research reports also use tables and figures to present experimental data in easy-to-grasp visual form.
Related topics:
Literature reviews
Theoretical papers
Poster presentations