During recent days, I have received multiple queries asking for help in writing research articles as it is important factor in getting PhD scholarship abroad. So, just to help everyone I am writing guidelines and my opinion, feel free to improve these or suggest better alternatives.
In my opinion, to write research article scholar first should read loads of article in same domain as his/her research area. By doing so, two important milestones are achieved:
1. Writers need to read.
A lot. Magazines. Books. Periodicals. And so on. They need to grasp the art of language, to appreciate the finer points of words. As they read, they should jot down ideas and capture thoughts as they come. Nothing inspires a writer like reading someone else’s words.
2. “State of the art / literature review” section can be written in appropriate manner with full command over what has already been published.
I know in Pakistan sometimes supervisor don’t point students to good repositories of research articles and stick to what is not considered as state of the art but students/scholars should also strive for the excellence (specially, Masters level scholars who are aspiring to be researchers).
Now the structure of article:
Generally in computer science when we write article, we have following structure in our mind:
1. Introduction
a. Introducing problem
b. Problem impact on society / science
c. Novelty of proposed solution / study
2. State of the art / literature review
This is bit tricky section as you can review literature from last 100 years or may be last 10 years. You can be creative how you present literature to the reader. You can organize literature review in subsections based on certain dividing criteria. In your case you can have subsections dealing with qualitative and quantitative analysis, for example. And here you can also write what is lacking in current studies and thus you can show how important is your research.
3. Proposed solution / methodology
In this section you write what you have done. Here you describe solution / methodology adopted /steps carried out etc. This section is your actual work, so you can be innovative here. Draw figures to show steps carried out and similar things.
4. Results and analysis
As the section name suggests, here you pen down results drawn from the study. You can show results by using many techniques, for example, graphs, statistical analysis, charts etc. In computer science it is important to compare your results with other state of the art methods as well. But I am not sure about economics or social sciences.
5. Conclusion and future work
In the last you conclude study with briefly writing importance and result of your study. Then you can suggest the way forward.
For reference you can have a look at my webpage of publications. You can see most of my publications in pdf there: https://sites.google.com/site/drkhanrizwan17/publications
Specifically, you can have a look at this publication of mine to see how research articles are structured: http://liris.cnrs.fr/Documents/Liris-6022.pdf
Last comment:
One thing which is very important in writing research article is to keep in mind readers. When researcher writes an article, he/she usually have worked on the problems for months or years. Thus, many terminologies that are straight forward to him/her are as obscured as Bermuda triangle to readers. So, whenever you use some terminology or reference some one's work, write 1-2 lines to give a gist of it. Secondly, try to break long and complex sentence in small and more comprehensible, so that even a novice can get you.
