What Is Research? And How Do I Do It

Written by Mariana Horta and Emily Smith

So you have a research paper to write. But … what is research? How do you know if that paper you were assigned is a research paper (vs. a paper that requires a bit of research)? And how do you start a research project? In this guide, we’ll answer these three questions and more, as well as provide resources to help you tackle your next research project. 

What is research?

At a basic level, research is what you do when looking for solutions to a problem or answers to a question. For example, when you compare prices for your next flight, you are doing consumer research. In this sense, you probably research stuff all the time. 

However, most of this research does not ultimately add to an existing academic conversation about a topic. In an academic context, researchers look for solutions to problems and answers to questions that advance knowledge in their disciplines. Then they publish their research to contribute to a scholarly conversation on their topic. 

You will generally conduct your research in stages: 

First, you will identify a research question by reading broadly on your topic until you find a controversy or an unanswered question you wish to address (see 8 steps to jumpstart your research, below).

Next, you will find an appropriate methodology to answer this question and develop a research plan. As you implement this plan, you will write, documenting your process and your findings and organizing your ideas. For example, if you are writing an empirical paper¹, you will draft a methods section where you will describe the data you used, how they were acquired, and the techniques you employed to analyze these data and interpret the results. If you are writing a literature review or a humanities essay, you will document your sources and the criteria you used to decide whether to include or exclude sources from your research. 

Finally, when you complete your analyses (of your data, your sources, etc.), you will draft a research paper to share your findings. Through this process, you will usually discover that answering your research question raises further inquiries, which can start the cycle anew. 

As a student, you will share your findings with your professors and your colleagues if you present your results in class. You may also seek to publish your research papers to share them with a broader audience. Here is a great list of undergraduate research journals that may publish your papers. 

When is a writing assignment a research assignment?

You are likely to encounter a broad range of assignments in college, most of which will require some research, but not all are true research assignments. Sometimes, you just need to find a few references to support an argument, interpretation, or position. 

Conversely, research assignments ask you to explore a topic of your choice or answer a question that has not been addressed in lectures or assigned readings. Because research takes time, these assignments are often longer-term projects such as a term paper or a senior thesis. 

As you approach a new research topic, it may be helpful to distinguish between essays where you use research to advance a position and papers where you seek to answer a research question:  

• Argumentative essays start with a thesis (a position) you believe to be true. Then you collect evidence from various sources to support this thesis. You will often find these types of essays in the editorial pages of newspapers. For example, Paul Krugman is a Nobel prize laureate who offers insights into current affairs in his New York Times column. If you read these op-eds, you will note that Krugman is sharing his insights on issues of the day. 

• A research paper starts with a research question or problem and proceeds with a rigorous approach to find an answer. Naturally, the approaches viewed as legitimate and “rigorous” vary by discipline. Krugman’s theoretical work offers an example from economics. You can read one of his most influential papers here.² If you do, you will notice that Krugman’s scholarly work is very different from his op-eds. In this paper, he follows strict disciplinary norms to propose an economic model and examine its implications analytically (i.e. with math). This paper advanced economists’ understanding of international trade and helped explain why industries become geographically concentrated. 

If your assignment prompt asks for your position on a topic, write an argumentative essay. Research your topic so you can defend your thesis using logical and persuasive evidence. 

However, if your assignment is to research a topic of your choice or a question that is not yet settled in the academic literature, start with a research question and approach it with rigor, curiosity, and an open mind (check out our unpacking prompts guide for more useful advice on interpreting writing prompts).

Eight steps to jump-start your research 

Assuming you are embarking on a research project, consider taking the following steps:  

1. Talk to your professor. Go to office hours to discuss your initial ideas with your professor, gather some feedback, and clarify the parameters of the research assignment.

2. Give yourself enough time. You will need plenty of time to read widely on your topic, find a research question, and figure out the best methods to answer your question or solve your problem. Once you plan your research, you will need time to implement your plan and write your research paper. If a research paper is due at the end of the term, go to office hours during the first two weeks of the semester to discuss potential topics with your professor. If you are planning a senior thesis, start the process in your junior year so that you can use the summer months for field research or other data collection.

3. Explore your field and settle on a topic. Start by reading broadly to understand the different lines of research and identify any controversies or unanswered questions within your field. Asking a librarian for help is a great way to get started. They can teach you how to use all of your library’s resources. In addition, reading literature reviews is particularly helpful for this early stage of research. If Annual Reviews cover your subject, look for an annual review article on your topic or one closely related to it. 

4. Find a research question. Once you acquire a broad understanding of your topic, you will need to narrow your focus to a single controversy or unanswered question. Try writing a short paragraph introducing your topic and closing with your research question. Can you do it? If you find yourself writing several questions or discover that your topic is too broad to be stated as a question, you will likely need to narrow it down. Try breaking your topic into somewhat independent “parts” and select one to research further. Now focus your reading on this “part,” and try writing that paragraph again, ending with your revised research question. You may need to go through a couple of iterations of this exercise, but don’t get stuck on it. You will have opportunities to refine your research question's scope, focus, or language as you start researching. Check-out lessons from cats for more advice on refining your research question. 

5. Consider how you can best answer your research question. Your academic discipline (or the course you are taking) will influence the range of research questions and the methodologies available to you. Your methodology is the approach you choose to conduct your research, and it will define the type of research paper you will write. The next section provides an overview of several different types of research papers and resources to help you write them. You may also want to check out locating your primary sources for insight on identifying the best approaches for your research question.  

6. Draft a practical research plan. Start with a brief explanation of the topic you want to research, including your research question. Then describe the methodology you will employ to answer your question and what type of paper you will write. You may find it helpful to break down your plan into discrete tasks and include a timeline to keep yourself organized. Keep your practical plan brief and informal. It only needs to include as much information as you require to organize your process, and no one but you needs to read it. A good rule of thumb is that you should be able to draft a “good enough” practical plan in a couple of hours and keep editing it as you research. 

7. Consider drafting a research proposal. Often a professor will ask you to submit a research proposal, which will be a longer and much more formal version of your research plan. Research proposals tend to include an introduction to motivate your research question, a background section or literature review where you show that you have read broadly and deeply on your research topic, a proposed methodology, a research plan, and a bibliography.

8. Write your paper while you research. While you might think of writing as something you do when you have finished your research, you should actually write throughout the research process. Writing brings rigor and clarity to your work. It helps you identify tangents or dead-ends so that you can course-correct, eventually producing a clear, linear research paper. The best part is that you will have a complete first draft when you finish your analyses. This draft will still need a few rounds of revisions, but it will save you from facing a blank page at a point when you may be running out of steam and out of time. 

What type of research paper will you write? 

The type of research paper you will write depends on your assignment and the methods you choose to answer your research question. Although this is not a universal typology, we like to think of research papers as belonging to one of the following five categories: 

1. Literature reviews establish what others have written about a topic by summarizing the existing academic research surrounding it. Literature reviews can also synthesize or evaluate relevant sources, identify gaps and controversies in the literature, and propose directions for future research. Need to write a literature review for a class or for part of a larger research project? We’ve got you covered! Read our guide to writing a literature review to learn more. 

2. Empirical papers use data to answer a research question. These data come in several forms—qualitative or quantitative, observational or experimental. 

   • Qualitative data usually comes in the form of texts, such as human answers to open-ended questions, fieldworkers' observations, or an archive of documents. 

   • Quantitative data include numbers, which can be summarized and analyzed with statistical methods. 

   • Observational data are collected when researchers measure or describe phenomena as they occur in the world, or when human beings answer survey questions or generate other data over the course of their everyday lives, such as computer logs or medical records. 

   • Experimental data are collected when researchers measure an outcome in the presence and in the absence of an intervention they can manipulate. This approach allows them to estimate the effect of the intervention on the outcome of interest. 

   Owing to this diversity of data types and methodological approaches, disciplines as disparate as chemistry and anthropology rely on empirical research.

3. Humanities essays. Research papers in the humanities will generally follow an analytical essay format. First, you will read broadly and critically on your topic to develop a thesis. You will then employ various sources to support your argument. Beyond our guide for writing a literary analysis (one of the most common forms of analytical writing), you may find this guide from the Yale Poorvu Center for Teaching and Learning helpful as you embark on a humanities research project. If your humanities essay is a cultural critique, you will also enjoy this interview with bell hooks, who explains cultural criticism better than we could ever hope to. Finally, you may appreciate this concise guide to humanities essays by Professor Easton from the English Department at SUNY Geneseo. 

4. Historical essays. Historians have their own methods of understanding and explaining the past. Thus, while the format of a history paper will be somewhat similar to the essays you produce in your humanities courses, you will need to follow specific conventions. If you are writing an essay for a history class, you are in luck! We asked a historian to write a guide for aspiring history writers. Our guide focuses on writing historical essays employing a diversity of primary sources. However, another approach to historical essays is to critically analyze the work of previous historians to produce a historiography, which explains how historians’ perspectives on a topic evolved over time. Thus, you may think of historiographies as historians’ literature reviews. 

5. Theoretical papers approach problems from first principles and solve them without relying on data. These papers often follow strict disciplinary conventions for defining the problem and writing the solution. Sound complicated? It doesn’t have to be. If you are taking a class in a theoretical discipline, you are already reading texts that follow its norms, so you can model your writing on those materials. You may also find one of the following resources helpful: a guide to writing philosophy papers, a guide to writing mathematical proofs, and a concise guide for computer science papers.³ We did not write these three guides, but we think they are excellent and will help you write great papers. And remember: you can always ask your professor to clarify the parameters of the assignment and the conventions you need to follow. 

Get started! 

Now that you have a better sense of what's involved in academic research, it's time to dive into your project! Here are four steps you can take right now to get the ball rolling:

1. Check on your professor’s office hours or email to request an appointment

2. “Go” (either in person or online) to the library to look for sources 

3. Make an appointment with a research librarian

4. Schedule a session with a tutor at your college’s writing center

Suggestions for further reading from CEG and beyond:

• Learn to read and understand your assignment prompts

• Learn how to incorporate sources into your writing.

• Learn how to evaluate sources. 

• Learn how to avoid plagiarism in your research paper. 

• Learn how to write an annotated bibliography.

• Learn how to write an analytical essay.

• Learn how to write a literature review. 

• Learn how to plan your senior thesis. 

If you enjoyed our Paul Krugman example and are interested in economics, you will like this short essay where Krugman outlines his research strategy. 

Similarly, if you are interested in mathematics and computer science, don’t miss this great one-page advice on writing a computer science paper.

¹ Empirical research is based on experiments or observations rather than theoretical knowledge. In other words, you do empirical research when you use data to find an answer to a question. 

² Krugman, Paul. "Increasing returns and economic geography." Journal of political economy 99.3 (1991): 483-499.

³ Lamport, Leslie. "State the problem before describing the solution." ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes 3.1 (1978): 26-26.

Special thanks to Emily Smith & Mariana Horta for writing this post and contributing to other College Writing Center resources