How to Write a Successful Research Paper

1. Introduction!: Hi there. Welcome to this course. My name is Andre, and I used to be where you are right now. I used to find writing research papers incredibly tedious and frustrating. The first grader ever received for a research paper was a six out of 10 which means that I barely passed. But fortunately, a phone. Great mentors who showed me the way. So my next grade was a seven out of 10. Then I get in eight in the nine. At some point I got invited to the honors project off my university and a year later won the first prize for the best paper off my year. Today I've published both empirical and theoretical research in the areas of newer science and psychology, some of which is published in very competitive journals. And the number one feedback I have received again and again is that I'm a very good writer , and I believe that this played a big role in my success. So that's me. And in this course, I want to help you achieve the same while skipping a lot of the frustration that I had to go through to learn what I know today. Therefore, this course is not just about learning how to write a research paper, but also about learning how to make it successful. To get a good grades when a price or publishing attractive scientific journal specifically out of this course, you will be able to understand the logic and structure off research papers identify the qualities that make research papers effective. Know what to write in each part of each section. Streamline your writing process to achieve a better paper in less time. Massa English expressions to make your writing flow and to use free tools to get tedious aspects done In seconds, you will see that this course works like a domino effect. We will start at the key lessons and then step by step work towards the details. You will see that this will make it a lot easier to keep the overview and stay focused on the things that really matter when you write a research paper. This course is for everybody who needs survived a research paper. Be that for your bachelor or massive thes is or your doctoral dissertation or for scientific publication, and this course will be perfect for you if you have done empirical research involving human participants. But even if you've done other types of research, you can still get a lot of benefit from this course. Now, I want to be honest with you. You will have to put some time and effort into this course before you see results. However, I believe that at the end this course will save you time because it will help you to avoid a lot of the mistakes that beginners typically make and that caused them to waste a lot of time, and that cost him a lot of frustration. In addition, even if you are a very good researcher, I think it will be hard for you to succeed in a research if you don't also know how to sell your research well in your writing. So if you signed up for this course, then I definitely think that you're on the right track and I will help you to get towards the paper that you can feel proud off as quickly as possible. All right, I'm excited to get started with you, and I see you in the next election 2. The Two Elements of an Effective Research Paper: So what makes a research paper effective? And before we can understand this, we first need to make sure that we understand the general structure off research papers. So let me tell you right now that their two main components that every research paper has and that would have to be included in, for example, a one sentence summary off your research paper. And these two parts are the research question and your answer to the question. For example, your research question could be, Is this theory true, or does this treatment work, or is this ugly the intractable or does gravity work on light? Pretty much every research paper starts with some research question, because that's what research is about. It's about answering questions now. Of course, there's a little bit Maurin, a research paper that is going on. So, for example, before the research question, we usually first explain why we actually want to ask this question. Then, after we've introduced the research question, we usually explain how we try to answer it for an empirical study that will usually be about describing the study that you did or if you did computer simulations than it's about describing those computer simulations. Or maybe you try to answer a question through a literature review, whatever it is you did after the research question, hugely, let the reader know what it is you did. And then after that, you explain what you found and that will lead to your answer to your research question. And most research papers are structured into four sections. On the first section is the introduction section, in which you explain what your research question is and why you have picked it. Then there is the method section, which you explain what you did to answer your question. Then there's the results section, which you explain your findings. And then finally, there's the discussion section in which you speculate what you can conclude from your findings on what you cannot conclude. So this is what it research paper January looks like. So the next question is what makes a research paper effective? And as I just set, the main two components of a research paper are the research question and the answer, and therefore the two things that an effective research paper needs are an interesting question and a compelling answer, and you will find that everything that you have learned about research, everything that you need to pay attention to in a research paper either falls under the first or the second point, either. It's about whether you research question is interesting, and a minimum aspect here is that it should be a new question that hasn't been answered before. Or it is about how compelling your answers. So ineffective research paper communicates an interesting research question and then gives a compelling answer. And that means that the section in which we actually sell our research are the introduction section and the discussion section. In the introduction section, we sell our research question, and in the discussion section we sell our answer. And, comparatively, the method section and the results section are more descriptive. You just describe what you did, and you described the findings that you obtained, and most people find the methods and the results section the easiest to write, because in those sections they just describe what they did. And they just talk about the things that they have been trained in, which is research. While the introduction section of the discussion section where you actually need to sell your research feel a lot more fuzzy, and therefore most people find them a lot more difficult. But these are actually the sections that matter the most, because if a researcher is not interested in your question than that researcher will not read your paper and ever researcher is not convinced by your answer, then most likely that researcher won't site your paper. So the key lessons off this lecture are that in order to sell your research, you need to show that your research question is interesting, and you need to show that your answer or your conclusion is compelling now because these aspects are so important. Let's look at them in more detail in the next lecture. 3. How to Make your Research Compelling Without Overselling: Okay, so now you know the qualities of an effective research paper. But how do you make your paper compelling? And the first thing that I would recommend you look at is your research question. You can make your research a lot stronger simply by fine tuning a research question before you even start writing. So suppose that your findings are not exactly what you want them to be, which is very often right, and that you just can't give a compelling answer to your question. In that case, I recommend that you ask yourself, Which question can you answer or put differently? What conclusion can you draw from your findings? And the conclusion that you can draw should determine your research question. So let me give you an example for that. I once conducted a research project in social psychology, and I was interested in the question whether when we look at another person's face, we automatically judge how trustworthy that person looks based on the face. So, for example, most people, when they look at alli a woods half the feeding that he looks relatively trustworthy. But most people, if they look at direct Nicholson, get the feeling that he doesn't look trustworthy at all. And my research question was, Do people make these judgments automatically when they look at another person's face? So I conducted some research to answer that question, and when I presented that research to my colleagues, they said, You cannot conclude from your findings that people automatically form trustworthiness impressions from faces and I realized that they were right, and so there was no point in arguing for me. And so what we did instead is we changed the research question because we realized that even though we cannot conclude that people form these impressions automatically, we can conclude that people form them spontaneously. And the difference is that when I say automatic, I mean that people do it kind of without thinking about it, without making the conscious decision to form these impressions. While what my research really showed is that people do it, but we don't really know how they do it, whether it's something automatic or whether it's the conscious decision to do it. And so by changing the word automatic to spontaneous, we accounted for that limitation. And once we change the research question to whether people spontaneously form trustworthiness impressions from faces. I never heard the same criticism again. So one of the most powerful things you can do before you even start writing is to find two new research question so that you can give a compelling answer. And when you do that, you will typically have to balance between two things. On the one hand, you want to keep your question interesting, but on the other hand, you want to be able to give a compelling answer. And as a rule of thumb, the more interesting the question is, the harder it is to give a compelling answer. And the goal should be to find the sweet spot where your question is still interesting. But you're also able to give a compelling answer. All right, so the key lessons of this lecture our first. To make your research compelling, choose a research question that fits to your findings, and second, try to find a balance between making your question interesting and you answer compelling all right before we continue. I just want to quickly mention that during the lectures, I will mention Resource is such as templates, samples and links, and you can find all of these resource is in the class project. So whenever I mention a resource in the lecture, you can go to the class project and downloaded from there. All right, that's his with his lecture, and I see you in the next one. 4. Avoid Wasting Time: Two Strategies to Streamline Your Writing: before we get into the actual writing, it's worth to stop for a moment and ask ourselves what's actually the best way to approach the writing and their two tips. I want to give you in this lecture, and the first tip is to start with an outline. So what do I mean by that? Now suppose that you wanted to build a house, and one thing you could do is to jump right away into the building off the house. You could take some bricks and put them on top of each other and start building the house, but was likely gonna happen is that all of a sudden you realize that the way you started doesn't make entirely sense, or you realize that things that you thought would fit together in the end don't really fit together. Or you may realize that after you've built the house, it doesn't really look the way you hoped it would look. And the reason why this happens is that once we start building the house, we need to pay attention to a lot of details. We basically need to think at the level off where we put the bricks while the most important thing at the beginning is just the general structure off the house. And only when you get that clear, it makes sense to think about the details, such as How exactly do I put each and every brick? So therefore, when you build a house, it makes sense to start with a blueprint, and only when that blueprint is ready and gives you an idea off. How that house will generally look like it makes sense to actually start building and focus on the details and for writing it's exactly the same is usually not a good idea to go straight away into writing text, because when you're writing text, you need to pay attention to a lot of details that aren't really that important. At the very beginning. The most important thing at the beginning is what you actually are going to right. What is your content? What is the structure off your argument and to make these key decisions? It simply isn't necessary to write text yet. Instead, it makes more sense to start with a general outline in which you just write down in bullet points what you're going to say and in which order you're going to say the things that you want to say, and this may sound counterintuitive because it's an extra step, but this will actually help you to safe time. I outlined all the time for every paper, and still people keep telling me that I write very fast, and I think that's because ourself myself from a lot of trouble and get to the actual writing stage a lot faster if I started with an outline. So my first recommendation is to start with an outline, and I'm gonna show you later and more details how you can do that. For now, there's another advice that I want to give you that can also safe you from a lot of trouble . And the second advice is to write first and added later. So what is one of the worst things that can happen to you when you write a research paper? And for many people, one of the worst things that can happen is the so called writer's block when you just don't know what to write and waste your time staring at your screen without any idea what you want to write. So let's take a moment to think about the question Why Writer's block actually occurs. And the main reason why writer's block occurs is because people try to do too much at the same time. And essentially what happens then is that they set the target so high that they simply can't do it, so they end up staring at their screen, seemingly without any good idea. But it doesn't have to be that way. Once you allow yourself to be not so perfect at the beginning, you can create this step by step process in which you right, and then you added it and then you added it and then you edit it. And in every step you paper gets a little bit better and a little bit better and a little bit better until you suddenly think, Hey, this is actually a pretty good paper. So when you started writing, don't try to be too perfect at the very beginning. Instead, write down whatever comes to your minds, no matter how silly it sounds. And then in the next step, go through your paper again and make it a little bit better. And I can tell you from personal experience that I've written some papers where people said that this is very well, Britain. But you would really be amazed to see how crappy the first version looked. So don't worry. If your first version doesn't look that great, that is completely normal. Just trust the process, right? Whatever comes to your mind and then edited and edited and added it and you will arrive at a great paper. Okay, so, to sum it up, my two advices Our first start with an outline Don't go into the details right away. Start with a general outline off what you want to say. And second, don't try to be too perfect at the beginning, right? Whatever comes to your mind and then edited and make it better and better and better. All right, that's it for this lecture. And in the next lecture, I'm going to show you how you can create perfect references using free software. 5. The Three Goals of the Introduction Section: okay, It's time to get started with the introduction section. And in this lecture, I'm going to give you an overview off what's gonna happen so early? I discussed with you that in the introduction section you show your reader why your research question is interesting and worth answering. But now we're gonna zoom into this a little bit more, and we're going to split up what we mean by interesting. So the goal of the introduction section is to show that your research is first important, which means that it helps to solve a general problem or that it helps to advance our understanding off some interesting phenomenon. And that's basically what we already covered a little bit at the beginning. You want to show what the broader relevance off your research question is. Another thing you want to show is that your research question is novel, that it hasn't been answered before by previous research. And finally, you want to show that your research question is timely, which means that it's the logical next step after the research that has already been conducted. And if you can achieve these three things, show that your research question is important novel and timely. Then your readers will be very intrigued by your research question. Okay, so these are the goals. Now, let's have a look at the structure off the introduction section. So here the essential parts that he usually find in an introduction section. At the very beginning, you usually start with the importance off your general topic. And then from there you go into a literature review in which he discussed the research that has already been conducted and in which you point out whether there are conflicts in the literature or whether they're gaps. And this is very important because the goal of your literature review is actually not to give a full review off the whole literature, but to lead towards your research question. So the story you're going to tell there is basically that this is what we already know, and this is what we don't know. And my research is going to feel the cap. Okay. And then after the literature review, you stayed your research question. So the question that you want to answer with your research and finally you given outline off your paper so you give you a reader a little idea off what's going to happen in the rest of the paper, and these are the essential parts off pretty much every introduction section. And as a general rule of thumb, the introduction section starts broad. So it starts with the importance off the general topic and then step by step. You narrow it down, narrow it down until you arrive at your research question. Okay, I know that there's a lot of information, so let's go through a little example to make this more vivid. So let's say that you have done research on depression, so in this case you could start your paper by saying a little bit about why this is an important society of problem. For example, it is well known that depression can severely impair people's well being and ability to function. And that way the reader immediately understands. Oh, okay, so there's a problem that we want to solve. Then comes the literature review, and what I'm going to say now is a little bit made up. So just take it as an illustration. Research has shown that depression is not cost the way originally assumed. However, there is no validated treatment that fits our current understanding off depression. So this is a really short example to just give you a general idea how the literature review works. So it's not just an an endless review, but it's a review that leads toward the research question. In this case, the research question could be. Can treatment X and Treatment X may be following the more current understanding off depression. Can treatment acts reduce depression? And then you would given outline off your paper So you would say something like to answer this question. We perform four studies or whatever you did and hopefully can see that in this example, all the three goals are reached. It's clear why the topic is important. It is also clear that the research question is novel because there is no validated treatment that fits our current understanding. So it's a novel research question, and the question also feels timely. There's a little bit more implicit, but the question feels as the logical next step after the research that has already been done. And that's the ideal case you want to lead to your research questions such that it feels important, novel and timely. Okay, so hopefully you can see now how an introduction generally works. Now, the question is, how can you construct such an introduction yourself? And I'm gonna walk you through the process in the next lectures. And the first step is gonna be a literature search. You need to find the research that has already been conducted. So let's look at that in the next election. 6. How to Find Relevant Citations in a Seemingly Endless Literature: The first step to constructing your introduction is to search the literature and to search the literature you need to do three things you to first locate relevant papers, then you need to get them and ideally, for free. And then finally, you need to scan them and decide which papers you want to use in your own paper and which ones you don't want to use. So let's go through these three steps. So first of all, we want to locate relevant papers. How do we do that? And this is one of the most tedious parts because in most cases the literature is pretty big. And so the first recommendation I would give to you is to start by asking experts, and if you have supervisor thin, I would start by asking my supervisors you can ask them what papers they recommend to start with. You can also ask them what office you should look for. They can also help you with finding relevant keywords to search for papers yourself. So start by asking them for whatever advice they can give you because they can make your life a lot easier. Another thing you can do is to use Google Scholar, which is my preferred search engine, to find research papers. I'm gonna show you later how Google Scholar works. And when you use Google Scholar or just searched the literature in general, don't just look for individual papers, but also try to identify who are the experts in the field. Which names tend to pop up very, very open. And once you find these experts, you can have a look how they write their introduction and what papers they side, because they probably already know the literature pretty well. And then, via their reference list, you can find other papers to read. It's also very often a good idea to go to their website because very often they have. Resource is they're very likely they will have an overview off their publications, and that can already be helpful. But sometimes they also like to blawg or just generally help people given overview off the literature, and that's something that can be very, very useful. Also, aside from just focusing on exports, whenever you find a paper that is very, very relevant to your research, that you can use their references to find more papers that could be relevant to your research. And then, finally, one advice I want to give you is that in whatever you do, try to locate review papers, so review papers, other papers that do exactly what you want, which is an overview off the literature. And if you find a review paper that gets very close to your research topic, then it can suddenly get very easy to get an overview off a literature. So whatever you use to find research papers, look for the review papers first. Okay, so that's how you locate research papers. Now let's talk about how you get them. 7. A Simple Trick to Get Almost Every Research Article For free: Okay, Next. How do you get the research paper? And most importantly, how do you get it for free? And the first thing you can do is to use your university library. Your university will most likely have an Elektronik library off research papers, and most of the time you will find the research paper that you're looking at in that library for free. Another thing you can do is to google the paper or check out the website off. The first author on you might be surprised this very often works because very often the first author gives away the paper for free on his website. Another thing you can do is to email the first author and ask for the paper, and this may sound a little bit weird to ask for a paper that you normally need to pay for , to get it for free. But with a 95% chance, the author will be happy to give you the paper. And the reason is that the people who actually want you to pay for the paper are not the authors, but the journal. Most of the time, the author will be happy if as many people as possibly actually read his or her paper. So very likely the author is just going to give you that paper. So that's how you can get pretty much every research paper for free. Okay, next, let's talk about how you scan a research paper. 8. How to Quickly Scan Research Articles: Okay, so after you got a research paper next you need to scan it and decide whether you want to use it in your research or not. So let me show you how I scan research papers to avoid that I waste too much time on every single research paper. So I started simply obviously with the title. And if the title is interesting enough, I read the abstract. And if I get the impression from the abstract that this research is relevant to my own research, then I read the introduction. And then after the introduction, I either read the whole paper. If I'm sure that this paper is relevant or if I am not sure, then I just jump right away to the summary and conclusion section at the end of the paper. And if it doesn't have a summary and conclusion section, I would go to the beginning of the discussion section and just read the first few paragraphs. And then, based on that, I usually make a final decision to either read the whole paper or decide that the paper is just not relevant for my research. So I don't read every paper that could be interesting, because very often you can already exclude papers based on the abstract or the introduction . Okay, so that's how you quickly skin research papers. And in the next lecture, I will show you some free software that will make it a lot easier to organize your research library and later create citations in your research paper. 9. How to Create Perfect Citations In Seconds Using Free Software: If you don't have a reference manager yet, then I strongly recommend that you get one. And if you don't have any yet, then I recommend that you use mentally mentally is a free software that you can use to organize your research library off research papers that you have, and you can use it to easily create perfectly formatted citations in your research paper. It's completely free. And I strongly recommend that you get it if you don't already have a reference manager. Okay, so I want to quickly show you what mentally is and what it looks like. So this is Mandalay, and as you can see here, it gives you an overview off all your research papers that you collected. You can also search in them, and you can also open them here and read them. It also has some nice features such as, for example, highlighting text so that you can find interesting passages again, and it will try to extract all the relevant information that you need later to cite this paper. So let me show you what that means. So if I go back to my library and I, for example, click here and click on copy s formatted citation. Then I can go anywhere, for example, to a word document and I can say paste. And there I get a perfectly formatted citation off that paper. And by the way, this citation is an A p A format. And if you want to get a different citation style, then that is possible. You can just go here on view and then citation style. And then you pick what ever citations tell you want to use in your research paper, and it will ultimately create a perfect reference for you in the chosen citation style. Okay, so I just showed you that you can copy pace references into your paper, but I don't actually recommend that there's a much better way to include references into your research paper, and I'm going to show you that later. For now, I just wanted to show you what mentally is and what it can do for you. And if you don't have a reference manager yet, I strongly recommend that you get mentally All right, I'm going to give you the link to mentally and I see you in the next election 10. How to Create an Overview of the Literature: the goal of your literature search should be to create an overview off the literature. So in this lecture, I want to show you how I do that. Okay, So this is Google Scholar. I'm gonna use Google Scholar to illustrate how I create an overview of the literature. And let's say that my topic is depression. So I'm gonna type in depression and we just had in the example that is about the new view on depression. And let's just say that this is the cognitive You just for this example and run a search for that. And now I get a couple of papers and here I always see the title. And underneath I see the author and the journal and the time in which it's published. And look at that. The first title already says a meta analysis off the efficacy of cognitive therapy for depression. So a meta analysis is not the same as a review, but it's almost as good a meta analysis is when you analyze the results off several studies together. So I can already tell from the title that this paper is very likely to give me an overview off relevant research on my topic. So here's what I'm gonna do. I can actually get a full version off the article here, and I'm going to click on download Ass and then I'm going to download it to the desktop safe. Here it is. And now, instead of opening it, I will drag and drop it into mentally. There we go. Here it ISS. And now I can open it in mentally. Andi here it ISS. Now the first thing I do is check whether mentally extracted all the information correctly . So I see here, for example, that it extracted the title correctly and I also see that it extracted the author correctly . But it didn't cash the journal and it also got the year wrong. And so he had a number of things that I need to correct here. So I'm going to do that quickly, and there it is. Now all the information are correct and this is important because Mandalay is later going to use this information to construct the references. So we need to make sure that these informations are correct. Sometimes it will get all the information correct by itself. But sometimes we also need to help it out the next I'm going to create a summary off that article. So here, for example, it says that the results document a greater degree off change for cognitive therapy compared with a waiting list or no treatment control for Marco therapy, behavior therapy and other psycho therapies. So apparently the cognitive treatment is very effective. So I'm just going to write down that the cognitive treatment works very well. And now I'm gonna go to the article here in my library. I'm gonna go to copy s formatted citation, and then I'm gonna put the citation underneath. So here we go. And there it is. I'm gonna make sure that they're next to each other, and then I would just go further and find the next article and write down again what I learned from this article and put the reference underneath. And if you keep doing that, you should end up with a list of references and what you learn from each reference. And we're gonna use that in the next lecture to construct the outline off your introduction section. All right, that's it for this lecture. And I see you in the next one 11. Outlining: Create The Blueprint of Your Introduction: The next step will be to create the outline off your introduction section based on the overview that you already created. So hopefully, after you've created that overview, you have something that looks a little bit like this. This is a fictional overview off a fictional depression literature, and it consists off statements. And for each statements, I have a number off references that support that statement and to create my introduction outline. I have a little template here, and that template is simply consisting of three headings. Importance literature review and research questions. And the one thing that I already know is my research question. So I'm going to write that down first. Ah, does my depression treatments work? And we said that is a cognitive treatment so we could call this maybe the re focus treatments. So this could be a treatment that trains people to be more focused on the positive, for example, and our goal will be to organize or exhortations in such a way that it creates a story that leads towards this research question that makes it appear as an important novel and timely question. Okay, so how do we do that? Well, the first thing we need is something that signals that our topic is important. So what I'm simply gonna do is I'm gonna have a look what I have here to achieve that. So one thing I have here is that depressive people are less productive or even completely unable to work. So that's definitely something that I can use to make the point that the topic is important . So I'm gonna copy paste this and just put it here and let me have another look. So here, this one is also useful. Depression impairs immune system. And that's true, by the way, depression actually impairs the immune system. So I'm also gonna copy, pays that and also put it under importance. And we can use that to start our article NATO. All right now, I need to continue with the literature review and ideally, the literature review should start brought and then narrow it down, narrow it down and go from things that we already know. Two things that we don't know. So that in the end, our research question appears as the hero that fills the gap in the literature. So let me have a look what we have here. Treatment off depression often involves revisiting negative experiences. No, that's about treatment that is already way too specific. The refocus treatment has been developed. No, that's way too specific treatments. No. Depressive people tend to pay more attention to negative things. Well, that's more broad. And also here we have depressive people tend to have better memory for negative things. That's something that could work at the beginning off our literature review. So I'm gonna put it here and now. From there, we somehow need to narrow it down and lead towards our question. So what more do we have? Treatment off depression often involves revisiting negative experiences, toe better process. These experiences that kind of connects to what I already put there. Refocus treatment? No, this this is probably gonna be at the very end. And therefore, actually, what I'm going to do is I'm already gonna put it here towards the end, and then I'm gonna figure out how I can fill this gap. Okay? Treatments that involve revisiting negative experiences do not work very well. Well, that connects directly to this first point that treatment of depression often involves revisiting negative experiences. So these belong together So I put them together here. And then we also have that researcher acts suggested that revisiting negative experiences may train patients, even Mawr, to focus on the negative. Well, that's a point that we can adds to this point. Treatments that involve revisiting negative experiences do not work very well. I'm just gonna put it here and now I'm gonna take the whole chunk, copy paste, and put it here. Now let's see how it goes. So now we have depressive people tend to pay more attention to the negative. They have better memory for the negative. And treatment of depression often involves revisiting negative experiences. But that might be a problem. Treatments that involve revisiting negative experiences do not work where Well, that very nicely connects to what we already set. And a researcher suggested that it may actually train people to focus even more on the negative. So we make more and more the point that the existing treatment is problematic in light of what we know about depression. And it may even make things worse. And so now the reader should really be thirsty for a better treatment and stay here. We have it. The refocus treatment has been developed which trains people to focus more on the positive . So I'm gonna put that here and there. I pretty much already have a story. And it already nicely connects to the research question. The only thing that I'm personally missing here is that I haven't explicitly said yet that this treatment hasn't been tested yet. And that's very important because we want to make the point that our research question is important novel and timely. And so I'm just gonna add a point here. Doesn't need a reference that Ah, the re refocus treat treatment has not been tested yet and they're pretty much having outline off my introduction section. So I start with a general importance. Then I talk about the things we know, and I narrow it down. Talk about treatments. I talk about how old treatments are problematic and lead towards the new treatment. I mentioned that it hasn't been tested major gap in the literature, very important that we test it. It is something novel, and it is very timely. So perfect now, of course, I prepared this example a little bit, and that's why I could construct it in like, five minutes. In reality, it takes longer, of course, to create such an outline. But this is the way how I create enough like. And sometimes I realized during the outline that there's a gap in the story, and then I go back to the literature and see whether I can fill the gap. Or sometimes I realized that in my story I actually don't even need all the research that I put in my overview. And that's also OK because it's not necessary to have a full literature review. You just need to make clear how your research connects to the existing research and why. It is interesting. Okay, so that's how you create an outline. And in the next lecture, I'm gonna show you how to turn this into text. 12. A Few Tips for Writing the Introduction: okay, Before we get into the actual writing, I want to give you some general pointers on how to write the paper. So first of all, a very general thing is to write in past tense, because the research that he going to describe in the introduction section happened in the past. Your own research happened in the past by the time that people read about it, so write about it in the past. Also, try to use short sentences. Whenever you find that a sentence gets too long, try to see whether you can break it up into two sentences, and you will find that this will make your writing clearer and more concise. Another recommendation is to use common scientific jargon so jargon that is common in your field. But do explaining you text what it meets, at least for once to make sure that all of your readers can understand you. And the reason why it's a good idea to use scientific jargon is because it will enable you to express a complex idea in just one word. So it will help you to make your writing more concise, and it will also look more professional. Then Another recommendation is to add in text citations using the mentally word plug it. So let me show you quickly how that works. Okay, here I am in word. And if you already insult mentally, then mentally will have automatically installed award plug in, which enables you to use mentally inward, which is very, very useful. And where exactly you find this plug in depends a little bit on the version off word. I find it under references, and now, after insulting mentally, I have a number of new buttons, such as insert or added citation, and using this button, I can very easily create perfect in text citations. So let's say, for example, that I want to say that cognitive therapy, it works very well, and I had a citation for that. So I click on insert or at its citation. Then I go to mentally, and now Mendel is gonna ask me what article I want this site and I can type in any search term to find that article. So I'm just going to use cognitive therapy. And there it is a matter analysis off the efficacy off cognitive therapy for depression. So I click on that and I say OK, and now mentally sends me back to words, and it adds a perfect in text citation, and it's going to make sure that the formatting is perfect. So, for example, if you have several citations, it will order the citations in the correct order or if you have used to citation before, and that means that you need to change the sanitation in some way. It will change the citation so it will immediately create a perfect in text citation. By the way, in my case, I need a p a. Former, if you need a different format than he can go to this drop down menu and choose a different citing former. But I need a P A. So I'm going to stick to a p a. Here. And by the way, you can also customize your citations. So say, for example, that I want to use the name of the author in the text. So say I want to write that Dobson showed that cognitive therapy works very well. Well, in that case, in a pdf format, I'm not supposed to use the author name again in the in text citation, but I'm just supposed to use the year. So in that case, I again click, insert or added citation. Then I go to mentally again. I searched the article. There it is. And now, instead of clicking on OK, I click on the citation again and now I can customize my citation. So here, for example, I can add a page number which I would have to do if I wanted to quote something from this article. But in this case, I just wanna suppress the author. So I'm going to check that and I click, OK, and now it gives me a citation using just the year. So in this way, without knowing exactly what the citation cell is gonna look like, you're going to get perfect citations. And best of all, if you add citations using this word, plug in. Then at the end of you article, when you want to add your references, you can just click on this button here, insert bibliography, and it will ultimately add all the references that you used in the text. So I strongly recommend that he used the word plug in off mentally to add in text citations 13. From Outline to Text: How to Write the First Draft: OK, now it's time to turn your outline into actual text. And when we write texts in a scientific paper, we don't just write one block off text. But instead we structure that text into subsections called paragraphs. So paragraphs are basically just subsections off the text and you mark the beginning of a paragraph by starting a new line and in denting that line, which means basically that you move with a little bit to the right. So here, for example, in this fictional text, this will be the beginning of a paragraph and this would be the beginning of a paragraph. And this will be the beginning of a paragraph. And you create these paragraphs by starting a new line and then pressing the tap button, which will move the text a little bit to the right. Okay. With that in mind, one of the first things you can do is to go to your introduction outline and ask yourself, what do you want to put in one paragraph? So, in most papers, the importance parts will be the first paragraph. That doesn't have to be the case all the time. For example, if your audience is very very familiar with the topic. Then it may actually be enough to to have just one sentence about the importance of the topic, just to remind your readers why the topic is important. But most of the time people spend one whole paragraph to the importance off the topic, and I'm going to show you some examples of that later. Then the literature review will definitely consist off more parts. So here, for example, we could think off. Depressive people tend to pay more attention to negative things, and depressive people tend to have more, have better memory for negative things. We could think of this together as one paragraph and then we could have a treatment paragraph and then we could have a paragraph that leads towards a research question by shedding doubt on the treatment and leading towards our refocus treatment. That could be one way how it works. And the first question to think about is, what do you want to put in one paragraph? And then the next thing you will have to think about is, how are you gonna put this into words? And I'm gonna help you with that in the next lecturers. But before I do that, I quickly want to show you a resource that you can get right out of this lecture, and that can help you to express things that you may want to express in your paper. And I'm talking about the useful English expressions sheet, and in that sheet you find expressions for all kinds of things that you may want to do in your paper, for example, expressions to explain something such as, for example, the expression for this purpose. And then you see how is used and you also see an example, and you find expressions for all kinds of things, for example, to add information. Oh are for describing a sequence off steps or events, or to demonstrate a contrast. If you want to point out a conflict in the literature, for example, that will be very useful or to give examples or to narrow your point down, or to signal that something is important or to draw conclusions from your findings, or to make an inference if you want to build a logical chain than these expressions can be useful or if you want to conclude with reservations, which is a very common thing for a scientist or if you want to summarize, so you can find a lot of expressions in here. So I just want to say that if you get stuck and you don't know how to express something, have a look at the common expression sheet and see whether you can find something useful in there. And there's one more thing that I want to show you that you can also download to help you with the writing out of this lecture. Among other things, he will find the introduction outline and writing template, which is a pdf. And on the first page you will find an example off an outline. And on the second page you will find some common expressions that he can use in each part off the introduction section. And I'm gonna walk you through the writing of each part of the introduction section in more detail in the next lectures. But I already wanted to let you know that there's also this pdf that you can use for orientation. All right, so next we're gonna zoom into each part of the introduction section. I see you in the next election 14. First Paragraph: Attract The Reader: The first paragraph is where you want to get your reader excited by your research paper and draw them into your paper. And the key here is to start with something bigger than your research, something that feels broad and mawr important than your research by itself. So, for example, if your research is about depression treatment, then the first paragraph could be about the devastating consequences off depression or if your research is about understanding the motor areas in the brain. Then you could talk about the amazing motor abilities that human beings have and that we don't understand yet. So it's good to start with something bigger than your research, something that will get your reader excited and that will draw your reader into your paper . Okay, so this is the goal. But how do you actually write this down? And a good strategy that is also very often used is to use the first sentence to make clear that you are in a very heart research topic and then to use the subsequent sentences to make clear why it is a hot topic. So to give you an idea, here are some expressions that he could use to start your first paragraph. Understanding something is one of the primary objectives off and so on. Numerous studies have been conducted on, and so decades of research have focused on the question and so on, or there has been a long standing interest in and so on. So the first sentence usually just signals that the topic is very, very hot. And then, in the subsequent sentences you make clear why is actually a hot topic. Okay, To give you an idea what this can look like in text, I wrote a little example off the first paragraph of a research paper. So let me walk you through it. Depression is a widespread problem, which impairs both people's well being and ability to function. According to the X Y survey, major depression is one of the most common mental disorders in the United States, with 7.1% off all U. S. Adults having at least one major depressive episode in their life. In addition, it is estimated that depression places role in more than half off all suicide attempts. So notice here that the paragraph starts with depression is a widespread problem. So right at the beginning the paragraph makes clear that depression is a hot or at least important topic. And then the paragraph gives more examples why This is an important topic for one, because depression is one of the most common mental disorders and is also probably a major cause of suicide. Now I want to add that it's not always necessary that you write a whole paragraph on this that depends a little bit on your target audience. If your target audience is very familiar with depression, then it's probably enough to just remind them quickly in one sentence. So in that case, the first sentence of this paragraph may already be enough. But if there people in your target audience were not that familiar with depression, then you probably want to write a whole paragraph on the importance off your topic. So that is how you start your paper. First you explain that your topic is a hot topic, and then you give some examples why it is a hot topic. All right, that's it with his lecture, and I see you in the next one 15. Middle Paragraphs: The Gap In The Literature: Okay, let's move to the middle paragraphs. And in these paragraphs, your goal is to give an overview off the relevant scientific literature and lead towards your research question. And if you finish your outline than you should have a lot of ammunition for that. And now it's basically a matter off putting it into words. So to inspire you a little bit for that already here some common expressions that you usually find in the middle paragraphs. Several studies have shown that, and so on. While some studies suggested that uh, other studies pointed in the opposite direction, three lines of research are relevant to this question. First, 2nd 3rd overall. It has remained unclear whether and so on. So this would be a sentence that appears a little bit later in your introduction and more explicitly leads towards your research question because it says that there's a gap in the literature, and then your research is going to save the day by filling that gap. Okay, now, let me give you an example again what this can look like in text. You see the little example that I wrote, and it starts with a paragraph that you already saw in the last lecture. Now let's have a look at how the text continues after the first paragraph. Recent research has shown that depressed people suffer from various cognitive biases. First, depressed people tend to pay more attention to negative aspects off their life compared to healthy people. Second, depressed people also tend to interpret their experiences more negatively. Third, depressed people tend to have better memory for negative aspects off their life. It has been suggested that these cognitive biases could play a role in both causing and maintaining depression. So notice you that right at the beginning, the paragraph introduces cognitive biases, which means that right away, after the first paragraph, this paragraph narrows down the topic from general depression to cognitive biases and depression. And that's what you want to do. You want to start relatively broad and then narrow down, narrow it down as you go further in the text. In addition, this sentence uses for the first time the expression cognitive biases, which he could see as an example off scientific jargon. Now remember that you should use scientific jargon, but he should also explain it in the text. And that's what happens in the next sentence terms. So here it is explained that cognitive biases involve paying more attention to negative aspects, interpreting things more negatively and having better memory for negative aspect. And then the paragraph ends by speculating that this could play a role in causing and maintaining depression. Now notice how the next paragraph starts. As yet, there is no treatment that is designed to address these cognitive biases, which immediately creates a conflict. On the one hand, we have evidence of all these cognitive biases and thing that they may play a role in causing and maintaining depression. But on the other hand, our treatments don't really do anything about that, and that's a conflict. And that's what we usually want to create in the middle part. Off our research paper. We want to point out that there is something that still requires further investigation to justify our own research. Okay, then the text continues. Existing treatments off depression often assume that depression is caused by an unprocessed trauma and that the key to treating depression is to enable the patient to process that trauma. However, recent evidence shows that the effectiveness of thes treatments is limited. In fact, if depression is caused by cognitive biases, there is the danger that these treatments further encourage attention to negative past events, and there's maintained cognitive biases. Now notice how this whole paragraph helps to further increase the impression off that conflict in the literature. They also keywords like, however, which signal conflict and also the key word, in fact, which signals that it's even worse than I just described. Okay, And then in the next paragraph, I say, Based on these considerations, the refocus treatment has been developed, which trains people to focus more on the positive aspects unless on negative aspects off their life. Now, in the following, I could describe in more detail how this treatment works. I could also describe existing research on their treatment, and then at some point, I would point out what has not been investigated yet and what we still definitely need to know, and that would lead to my research question. So that is how you write the middle part off your introduction section. You want to narrow your topic down and create conflict as soon as possible to justify your research and depicted as important novel and timely. Okay, so hopefully that gives you an idea how the middle paragraphs off the introduction section work. Also, don't forget the resource is that you got earlier because they can give you some common expressions that I usually used in these paragraphs and also some general expressions that can help you to express what you want to express and hopefully with all of that together your well armed to write the middle part of your introduction. All right, that's is with this lecture, and I see you in the next one. 16. Last Paragraph: A Hero Emerges (Hint: It's You): Okay, we're almost there. Now let's talk about how to write the last paragraph or the last paragraphs off your introduction section. And even though this part tends to be relatively sure, there's actually a lot of important stuff going on there. First you want to state clearly what your research questions, so here you will see an expression such as the goal off the present article is too, Uh, and then you say what you research is about, or even quite explicitly, the research question off the present article is, and then you say the question. And in my experience, it's better to be too explicit than to be to settle, because this is what your research is about. Your Rita has to get that. Okay, so that is the first goal. And then the second goal is to state your hypotheses slash predictions. So you find an expression such as we hypothesized that, or we predict that or two hypotheses are conceivable and so on. And then the final goal will be to given outline off the rest of your research paper. This is particularly important if your research people does not follow the normal format. For example, because it is not an empirical paper, and it doesn't have it doesn't fit into the conventional structure. And then you want to give an outline off what sections are coming and what you have been doing or if you paper dust, follow the center former than you still want to give a rough outline off the research that you did. So you want to say something like to test this hypothesis, we and then you give a very rough description off the study that you did or you say to answer this question, we And then again, you give a rough description off the study that you did or if you did several studies than you can say something like for this purpose we conducted. For example, three studies. First you describe study one second you describe study to third, you describe 33 Very straightforward. Okay, let me show you another quick example what this can look like in text. The goal of the present article is to test the effectiveness off the refocus treatment. That's the research question. Okay, then, next for this purpose, we randomly assigned people with a clinically diagnosed major depression to either a refocus treatment group or a placebo treatment group and compared self reported levels off depression before and after these treatments, that would be the outline off the paper. And then finally, we have prophesized that depression would decrease more after the refocused treatment compared to the placebo treatment. Now you may notice that this example does the three things that I just explained in a different order than I explained them. And that's fine because it doesn't really matter in which order you explain it, you can pick an order that works for you. All that matters is that you cover all these three calls. All right, so hopefully that makes clear how you write the last paragraph or the last paragraphs off the introduction section if you want to. You can also download the example text that I showed you in this lecture and the two previous lectures from the resource is off this lecture. And then I see you in the next lecture 17. The Goal of the Method Section: alright, it's time to move to the method section. And in this election I'm gonna give you an overview off what's gonna happen in this section . But first of all, I want to say congratulations because if you already finished your introduction section, then you have finished the part of the research paper that most people find the most difficult, including myself. All right with that set, one of the goals off the method section and essentially the goal is simply to describe what you did to get an answer to your research question. So if you did an empirical study that would be describing that study or if you did computer simulations, then that will be describing these computer simulations. Whatever you did to answer your research question, tell us about it in the method section. Now, the big question is what details do you need to include and what details can you admit? And the general rule is that other researchers should be able to replicate your research based on the information in the method section. So, for example, if another researcher wants to replicate your research, does it matter that your participants were sitting on a wooden chair? Probably not. And does it matter that the participants saw a blue dot on the screen? Well, maybe depends on your research and your research question. So what you need to include here is a little bit of a judgment call, and my recommendation is that if you're in doubt off some detail, then simply included, and if you face the problem that you have extensive amounts of information, say, for example, that he did a questionnaire with 200 questions, then you can include that information. So the 200 questions in an appendix and just refer to that in the method section. Okay, so this is what a methods section isn't. How generally works. Now let's move to the outline. I see you in the next election. 18. How to Structure and Outline Your Method Section: Okay, So let's create an outline for your methods section and the first step off. Creating an outline is always to find out what are the headaches, What things do you need to include and for what things do you need to find bullet points for? So, for example, for the introduction section, we had the headings importance literature review and your research. So now the question is what headings do we need to use for the method section and what the headings are? Well, of course, heavily depend on your research, so I want to give you two advices that can help you to find out what the headings for your methods section could be. First of all, check the guidelines off your target journal. Very often. Your target journal will already be specialized for a certain type of research, and they may have guidelines on what sections you need to include, and then you can just use their headings to create your outline. Another thing you can do is to check research articles with similar research and, ideally, research articles that are published in your target journal and then once you know what needs to be included for your particular research. So once you know the headings, you can start putting bullet points under each of these had its Okay, So there are various types of research and I cannot go through all of them. So I'm gonna go through one type of research that I'm very familiar with and that I think will be applicable to many people, which is empirical research with human participants. And even there, that can be a lot of differences from research to research. But the most common subsections that you find in the method section are for his participants who took part design. What groups did he use? What conditions did you have? Materials. What did you use to conduct your study? The procedure? What happened and in which order. And sometimes you also see a section on data analysis, and these subsections could be there headings off your outline. So let's zoom into each of these. So you outline could start with a participants heading and thinks he could list. Under that heading would be the sample size and also the number off male and female participants, the mean and standard deviation off the age of the participants. How the participants were compensated, whether they received course, credit or payment or whatsoever and every other information that is relevant, such as, for example, education or clinical conditions. For example, if you conducted the study on depression, then it can make sense to mention whether you're participants were depressed. Okay, then the next heading could be designed and things he could list. Here are the between subject factors that you have, so basically, the group's you divided participants into the within subject factors that you have. For example, if you measured depression at the beginning of the treatment and the end of the treatment, then he could have the within subject factor time. Whether you're measuring before or after the treatment. And, of course, your dependent variable, the next heading could be the materials. So these are all the things that he used to conduct your studies such as, for example, technical instruments. So, for example, if you use an M r I scan A than you would want to describe the MRI's skinner or it could be questioned years and remember that if you have extensive questionnaires or generally extensive information, then you can add that in an appendix. Images that you show to participants or that I relevant in some way sounds that you show to your participants. It can even be something like smells. It really depends on what your study is. For example, if you're investigating the brain areas involved in smelling, then you may need to describe the smells that you used. So anything that you used in your study gets included here. Then the next heading could be their procedure. And the procedure is basically a description off what happened and in which order. So, for example, how many parts or faces to do you study half. Did you, for example, half a training face? What different phases did you have any of study? You can also mention whether you randomize things, for example, whether you randomly divided people into groups or conditions, or whether you counter balance the order off something. So everything that is about what happened when belongs into the procedure and then another heading could be data analysis, although that depends a little bit if you use something really, really simple, such as, for example, a T test, then you don't really need to explain that you can go straight to the results and just say in one sentence that he used a T test. But if you use something more unconventional or more complicated, then you can describe that in the method section under a data analysis heading. So here you describe how you analyze the data. What were the steps and what did you do in each step? Everything that is relevant to understanding how you analyzed the data. Okay, if you want to see an example, you can download the methods outline and writing templates. On the first pace, you will see a sample of an outline. So this is an example for the fictional depression paper that we discussed earlier. And here we can see that this study had 43 participants, of which 12 were male, and the participants were patients off the psychiatric clinic acts, and they were diagnosed with major depression and so on and so on. So if you want to see an example, then you can have a look there, and in the next lecture, I will show you how you can turn that into text. I see in the next election 19. From Outline to Text: How to Write Your Methods Section: Okay, so hopefully you found out what the sections off your method section need to be, and therefore what headings you had to use for the outline. And now let's turn this outline into text. And first of all, I just want to give you some general writing tips, and the first is what I already said. Use appendixes to add extensive amounts of information. In addition to that, use short sentences, same as the introduction section. Short sentences are easier to read than long sentences and right in past tense, he study happened in the past. So write about it in the past, okay? And for the rest, it's actually straightforward. You just need to put your bullet points into words and to inspire you a little bit. You can go again to the methods outline and writing templates, and when you go to the second page, you can find some examples off expressions that you may find in a methods section. So, for example, for the design, you may write something like the study used a between subject design treatment group control group with a depression score on the huh depression scale as dependent variable, or for the procedure, you may write something like Before the experiment started, participants were randomly assigned to two groups, or the experiment consisted of two faces in the first face in the second face. So hopefully these expressions can help you to turn your outline into text if you need more than he can also use again the useful English expressions sheet. And here, for example, you can finds, Let's see you describe a sequence off events that could be useful for the Procedure section , for example. All right, for the rest is really straightforward. Just ride the points out that you already wrote down in bullet points, and I think you will find that writing the Method section is a lot easier than fighting the introduction section. All right, dances for this lecture and I see you for the results section in the next lecture 20. The Goal of the Results Section: Okay, now we get started with the results section, and that's also one of the sections that most people find easier because just like the Method section, it's not so much about selling your research but more about describing it. So the goal of the results section is simply to describe the results without interpreting them. And that's already yet describe your results without interpreting them. And in the next lecture, I will help you to create an outline for your results action. 21. How to Structure and Outline Your Results Section: The next step is to construct the outline off your results section. And first of all, there are a few decisions that you need to make. So one thing you need to think about is whether you want to visualize key results in figures such as, for example, a bar graph. Another decision you need to make is whether you want to use tables, which can make sense if you have extensive amounts of information. And another thing to think about is how you want to structure your results section. Because results sections are highly individual, there really depend on your results. And so there aren't many guidelines on how you should structure it. So in this lecture, want to help you as best as I can by giving you some general guidelines for each of these points. So one thing that is worth thinking about is whether you want to depict your key results in a figure. So, for example, for the fictional study that had discussed a couple of times about how to treat depression , we could include a bar graph that depicts the mean the mean depression off the placebo group and the mean depression off the treatment group. However, in that case, that wouldn't really be that necessary because if you mentioned in text that the mean was lower for the treatment group and if you also mentioned the means that basically already gives all the information that the reader needs, however, supposed that we had four means or even more well, then it can get a lot more difficult to imagine the pattern off the results. And in that situation, it can make sense to add a figure to make this more clear. So there's something you need to think about. If something is already clear without figure, then you don't need to use a figure. But if the figure helps, to clarify your results is definitely a great tool to use, and it doesn't have to be a bar graph. It can also be a scatter plot or a heat map or whatever makes sense in your case. Another thing to think about is whether you want to add a table. So this, for example, is a table from one of my studies, and I had the problem that I had to report a lot off Paramount estimates and the lower Bound and the upper bound off their confidence intervals, which is a lot of numbers. And so I decided to report these numbers in the table because if I put them all into text, this would be unreadable, right? So if you have a lot of information and especially numerical information, it can make sense to at this information in a table, and then he can just refer to this table in the text. And by the way, the same is true for figures. If you use a figure, refer to it in the text. Okay, the next we need to think about the outline. And so the general structure off your text. And as I said, there aren't really any clear rules for that because people have so different results. And if your results section is very short than it can make sense to write it in just one text with paragraphs. But if it's quite extensive than it can make sense to have subheadings, whatever you do to parts you find very open in the results section is one part where you describe what you did before the analysis. So this could be the first paragraph or heading, such as pre processing. And then after that, people usually describe what they're made. Analyses are, and I want to give you some pointers for each of these two parts. So what could you have done before the analyses? Well, you could have, for example, excluded participants or observations. Maybe because they didn't complete your whole study, and so you just couldn't use their data. Or maybe you transform the data. Maybe you combine two variables may be recorded variables or maybe applied some kind of smooth it. Another thing that may happen is that you have missing Datar and you fill them in with some kind off statistical technique. And if you have done so, that is definitely a good idea to describe that first and tell us how you did it. So start your results section with whatever you did before the main analyses, the next you describe your main analyses, and I want to give you a general recipe that I always use when I described my men analysis . So I always start by describing the research question that belongs to this analysis, and this is particularly important if you have several research questions because then it can get very confusing for the reader once you're actually trying to do there. So I always like to start with restating the research question that belongs to this analysis. Then after that, I described the analysis that I used. So, for example, did you use a T test? Did he use a Nova? Do you use regression, or did you use something completely different? What is it that he used? And then I described the results. And then after that, I do nothing. I'm done so especially if you restate your research question, it can get very tempting to also try to give an answer to that question. But resist that temptation. It's okay to restate your research question, but you shouldn't answer it in this section yet. Okay, so these are some general pointers on how to structure your results section and how to create an outline for that section. Now let's turn to the writing in the next lecture 22. From Outline to Text: How to Write your Results Section: Okay, So once you've decided how to structure your results section and for what you want to use figures and tables, the next step is to ride it out and again. The results section is very individual and very dependent on your research, but just to inspire you, I've created another outline and writing template. This time for the results section. It's on the first page you find a sample off an outline for a fictional study. So here, for example, before the analysis, it is mentioned that to participants dropped out during the treatment and therefore they're not included in the analyses. Then this outline moves to the main analyses, starting with the research question. Does the refocus treatment work? The analysis is a simple independent samples T tests with groups as independent variable and the Depression scores as dependent variable. And the results here reported an A p. A. Former is that the difference was significant and that the Depression score was lower in the treatment group. So this is how your outline could look like and for turning it into text. You can also find some examples off expressions on the next page here, for example, before we analyzed the data, we removed all reaction times. There were larger than 2000 milliseconds, which is 2% of all observations or the data of two. Participants were excluded from the analysis because they did not complete the whole study or for the main analysis. You can start by saying first we investigated whether acts, which is the research question. And this, especially using the expression first, can make sense. If you have several research questions and then you may say something like, We used an independent samples T test. And then the results showed that the difference between the groups was significant. Specifically, the average Depression score was lower in the treatment group. So this is what it could look like. And hopefully it's inspires you a little bit and you can download this. Pdf from the resource is off this lecture. All right, that's is with this lecture, and I see you in the next one 23. The Two Goals of the Discussion Section: Okay, We finally arrived at the discussion section, which is one of the more interesting sections, because, as I mentioned at the beginning, this is the section way will sell your answer to the question. And in this lecture, I want to show you what the main goals off the discussion section are, and also the logic and structure of the discussion section. So, first of all, what other goals in the discussion section and their two simple goals? First, you want to show that you gave a convincing answer to your question, and second, you want to show that you gave a valuable answer to your question. Now, with that in mind, let's have a look at the essential parts of a discussion section, So a discussion section often begins with a summary. There. You remind us off your research questions, your methods and your results very, very briefly. Then, after that, you finally get into the interpretation off your results. What do they mean? Did the treatment work, or are there alternative explanations? Now is finally the time to talk about this. Okay, The next part is usually the integration off your research into existing research. So how does it compare with reasons that is already there? And most importantly, what did you add to what we already knew? Another essential part is implications of your research. What are the general lessons that we can learn from your results? What general phenomena do we understand better? Or maybe how could your result help us towards potential applications? Then, very often you will find a section in which the researchers talk about limitations off their study. So what other weaker parts of your research and also importantly, do they invalidate your conclusions? Can you draw your conclusions despite your limitations, and then finally very open? At the end of the discussion section, you find a summary or conclusion section in which you just tell the reader in general what the key takeaways from your research are. So these are the essential and typical parts of a discussion section. Now, what's important is to not just know that these parts of their but understand what purpose they serve. So in the last slide, I talk about the two main goals off the discussion section, which is to make clear that you gave a convincing and valuable answer, and I'm gonna mark. These parts now in blue and green blue parts, are parts in which you're mostly concerned about arguing that you gave a convincing answer to your research question while in the green parts your usually more focused on the question whether you gave a valuable answer. So, for example, when you talk about the interpretation of your results and whether there are alternative explanations, then you're basically talking about the question. Are your results convincing? For example, if there are plausible alternative explanations for your results, then you may not be able to answer your question. Likewise, if your study has limitations, for example, if it is on Lee correlation all, or if the measurements do not turn out to be that reliable, or if part of your results did not confirm your hypothesis, then that could mean that you cannot give a convincing answer to your research question, and therefore these two parts interpretation and limitations are mostly about showing that you gave a convincing answer to your question. Now what about the other parts? So in the integration part, you basically showed that he contributed something new to the literature, which is the first sign that you contributed something valuable. Then in the implication section, you go a bit further and show what the general lessons are that we have learned. What do we understand? Better. What applications may be possible based on your results. So here you really show the reader the value off your research. And then finally, in the summary and conclusion section, you just summarised the key points again while focusing on the value off your research. What have we learned? What do we understand? Better. These things need to stay on the mind of the researcher after the researcher has finished your paper. Okay, When you look at this, you may wonder, why is it so cluttered? So, for example, why don't we take the limitations part and move it up to the interpretation so that we first discuss whether our answer is convincing and then we discuss what the value of our answer is. And that's actually exactly what I did in one of my first papers. And I remember that my supervisor made the remark that I wrote the paper in a very well chairman style, and he is what he meant. The problem is that if you put the imitation section here. Then you start your discussion section pretty much with the weak spots of your research, but you don't want to start with the weak spots off your research. It makes much more sense to first show the value of your research. And then, after the reader got a little bit excited about your research, start to talk about limitations. And this tends to be true. Most of the time. It's usually good to have limitations, while at least not at the beginning. But I also want you to be aware that these things are not fixed, and there may be cases in which it makes sense to put the limitations first. So, for example, a situation where I would put the limitations first is if there is something that looks like a serious limitation, something that will make many readers reject everything that I have to say about integration and implications. But that isn't actually a re a limitation. And if that's the case, I would start with the limitations to get that limitation out of the way. However, in most cases will make more sense to put the limitations more at the end off your discussion section. Okay, so now you know the essential paws off the discussion section and what their function ists . And now let's move to the next lecture in which we're going to construct the outline of your discussion section. 24. Outlining: How to Construct the Blueprint of Your Discussion: Okay, let's talk about the outline off your discussion section, and you've already seen this quite thorough overview off what he usually find in a discussion section. And in this lecture, I want to show you an example of that to make more vivid what you're supposed to do for each of these points. So as for every main section you can find a PdF, this time called discussion, outline and writing template. And on the first place you can again find a sample often outline. And when you can see, here are the main points that we already discussed. Summary interpretation, integration implications, limitations, summary and conclusion. And I recommend that you start by putting bullet points under all of these headings. So let's use our example again off the Depression study. So the research question there waas whether their so called refocus treatment actually works. And the study was basically just a treatment group in a placebo group. And the finding was that depression was lower out of the refocus treatment compared to the placebo. And ideally, you want to describe the results without statistics, and most importantly, you don't want to interpret it yet. First, just state the results, and then we move into the interpretation. So in this case, you can think off two explanations for the results, maybe even more, but I could think of to. And the first explanation is that the refocus treatment reduce depression. But an alternative explanation is that the placebo treatment increased depression. This is conceivable because we didn't have a pre measure off depression, so we don't know whether depression increased or decreased. But in this case, there is an additional note, which says, however, explanation to is unlikely because the same placebo was used in studies, ABC and there. It didn't increase depression. So although our results leave room for the possibility that the placebo increased depression, that is actually ruled out by previous findings now let's move to the integration with previous research and there. We made, for example, say that previous research focused on the question how unprocessed traumas could cost depression. And we are the first who tested the focus explanation off depression, that people have this focus on the negative and instead of the positive. So we're saying here both how our research compares to previous research and, most importantly, what it adds to that research. What's new? You want to make that clear in the discussion section. Okay, let's move to the implications. And here we could say that it is widely believed that depression is caused by unprocessed traumas. Our findings offer a novel perspective. Depression may be caused by and a certain information processing style that is focused on the negative. And that means that there could be a new approach to understanding and treating depression , which opens up the door for a new line of research to understand depression and new types of treatments. So this is basically the value off the answer we gave to the research question. This is what you can do with it. You can understand depression better, You can conduct more research to even better understand depression, and you can think of new treatments that hopefully work better than previous treatments. All right, so hopefully at this point the reader is really enthusiastic about our research. But now we get to the limitations. So what are limitations here? While an obvious limitation is that there was no measure off depression prior to the treatment and the reader will likely wonder why not? So we should give a reason. And in this case we may say, for example, that asking people to score their depression twice can lead to problems and give some references for that. So that's the reason why depression was only measured once per person. And the consequence is that we don't know whether depression decreased in the treatment group explanation one or increased in the placebo group explanation, too. However, as mentioned before, it is unlikely that depression increased. So now we have made clear that there is a definite limitation. We've explained why we couldn't get rid of it, and we have explained why it isn't a problem. So we're all good here. We can still give a convincing and valuable answer to our research questions. Okay, what else? Maybe another problem was that the sample size was relatively low, So why was it low? Well, it's hard to find enough people with a major depression. That may be the reason, however, our results were significant despite the low sample size. This speaks to the effectiveness off the treatment because you could argue that Hey, if we get significant results, even though we had a low sample size than that must mean that the treatment is relatively effective. Otherwise we wouldn't have found a significant results. So sometimes it's even possible to turn a limitation at least a little bit into a strength . But you need to be a little bit careful about that. And we're gonna talk about that in more detail in the next two lectures, when I'm going to tell you in more detail how you can deal with limitations and how you can write them down. Okay, it finally comes Thea. Summary and conclusion. So what happened in the study? We investigated whether depression can be treated by training, a positive focus, and our findings confirmed this. This gives us a novel perspective on depression, but more research is needed that investigates this novel approach in more detail and also replicates the results that we found in this study. And it would be desirable to develop more treatments that follow this new approach. So it's always nice to endure paper not just with your answer to the question, but also with a very rough hint what the next steps could be after your research, because that also adds more value to your research. If the reader feels that. Oh, not only did you given interesting answer, but you actually inspire me and other researchers to create mawr. Interesting research than that makes you research even more valuable. So it's very nice to end on that note. Okay, so that's the example off the discussion outline. I recommend that you try to put bullet points for your specific research under each off these blue headings here. And in the next lecture, we're gonna zoom into the limitation section in a little bit more detail because that tends to be one of the most tricky section. So join me for that in the next lecture. 25. How to Deal With Serious Limitations Without Lowering Your Impact: okay, in this lecture, I want to show you how you can deal with limitations, because that tends to be one of the most tricky parts off the discussion section. And first of all, I want to say that it's normal to have limitations. In fact, your reader assumes that you have limitations because every study has limitations. Therefore, one of the worst things you can do is to claim that you have no limitations, or at least to not mention any. And so to implicitly claim that you don't have limitations that will make you read a very suspicious and make it really trust your results less. So you have to mention some limitations. Okay, now suppose that you have limitations and you're worried that they prevent you from giving a convincing answer to your question. What can you do in that case? And the first recommendation I want to give to you is to simply look at the whole pattern off your results, because I've seen people arguing about some limitations that they may or may not have while completely losing sight off the fact that even if they have this limitation, they can still make the argument that their conclusion is right based on other results, So always make sure that you look at the whole pattern off your results. Another advice that I want to give you is to incorporate findings from other sources. You've already seen that briefly in the example that I just showed you off the discussion outline. So in the example, an alternative explanation was that the placebo group increased depression but then appointed to other research. Previous research that ruled that alternative explanation out. And that's how you can do this. It is not necessary that your results by themselves provide the convincing answer. You can also use findings from previous research and used them together with your findings to form a conclusion. Another advice that I want to give you is to compare your research with previous research. Sometimes it happens that you have a limitation simply because once you're trying to do is , for example, very, very difficult. Sometimes in some areas it's simply not possible to have a perfect study. A typical example is correlation or research. For example, if you investigate differences between genders than that, research tends to be correlation because you can't manipulate gender, you just have to take it as it is, and that means that you can, Onley observed. You cannot manipulate. And if that's the case for your research, then it is worth pointing out that you may have limitations. But these are actually standard limitations in your topic. And maybe you could even argue that while you have limitations there actually less serious than the limitations of previous studies, as long as you can give the feeling that your study is state of the art, or even better, it's not necessarily a problem if you have limitations. Okay, finally, I want to repeat my earlier advice, which is that if you can a draw convincing conclusion, it may make sense to adjust your question. It may be that your question is too ambitious, the way it's phrased, and by rephrasing it, making it a bit more narrow and making it a bit more modest, you may suddenly be able to answer your question. Okay, so if you have serious limitations, these are my suggestions for dealing with it. And in the next lecture, I'm going to get into the writing off the whole discussion section, including the limitations subsection 26. First Paragraphs: Okay, Now that you have hopefully thought about the content off your discussion section, it's time to turn it into writing, starting with the first paragraphs. And before you get started, I encourage you to think a little bit about the structure of your discussion section. So they're generally two options. You can write everything as one text, or you can write it with subsections. And very common here is that papers have an implication section and a limitation section, and you need to have a look what makes the most sense in your case. And most likely, this will be determined by how much you have to say about each aspect that we discuss before. Okay, Now, let's start with the first paragraph off your discussion section has already set. The goal here is to summarize your article up to this point. And common expressions you see here are in the present article we investigated whether and then the research question war. Our study addressed the question whether and so on, our goal was to the results showed that so this part is actually quite straightforward is just a summary off what you did Then, in the next paragraphs, you go into the interpretation off your results and make sure that there is a switch in paragraph or section from the summary to the interpretation, so that there clearly separated and what you want to do is interpret the results, and most of the time you will also immediately compare them to existing research. And when you do that, the most important point that you want to make clear is what did you add to that research? So common expressions you find here are there are three possible explanations for these results. One possible explanation is that another possible explanation is that our findings are in conflict with a long held believe that so here we're comparing with previous research. Contrary to the findings by Devon, it's all our findings indicated that, and so or our findings converge with previous findings. In addition, they show for the first time that so this is important. If your findings converged with what has been shown before, you want to make clear what you added to those findings. So that is how you write the beginning off your discussion section, and you can find more expressions for this part in the discussion, outline and writing template that I showed you earlier. All right, let's move to the next lecture 27. Implications: Okay, let's move to the implications. And, as I already said before, the implications are very often a subsection with a separate heading implications heading in the discussion section. But that is up to you. It all depends on how you structure your writing and how much you have actually to say so in the implications. We want to make clear what the broader value off our findings is. So what do we understand better now that we have seen these findings or what applications are conceivable? So common expressions you find here are our findings offer a novel perspective on our findings. Resolve the conflict between X has been off primary interest for decades. Our findings advance our understanding off acts by and so on. Our findings point what's a new approach to deal with some problem. So these are common expressions you see in the Implication section and you confined mawr in the pdf sample that I showed you earlier. And hopefully they will help you to turn the outline of the implications section into tax. All right, In the next lecture, we're gonna look at the limitations, which is one of the more tricky parts. So I see you for that in the next lecture 28. Limitations: How to Be Transparent Without Lowering Your Impact: Alright, it's time to write the limitations section, which is usually not the most fun, because we need to talk about the things that were bad in our research. But actually, even the limitations section can be a section in which you can truly impress your readers by showing the reader that you understand the limitations of your study very well and that you're very honest about that. And if the reader is already impressed by the value that you're providing with your research, then that will be the cherry on the cake. And as I already said before, very often the limitations are a separate section with separate heading. Just as for the implications. But again, that is up to you. You can structure your discussion section in whatever way you think make sense. Okay, so the first goal in the limitation section is quite obviously to state the limitations off your study, or at least the most important ones. So common expressions you find here are our study has two main limitations. First, second and so on. The most important limitation is that another limitation is that so. It's quite straightforward, and limitations you can think off are all kinds of things you can think off confounds unreliable measurements, unrepresentative samples, correlation of designs that do not allow you to draw conclusions about causality, or just in general conclusions that you cannot draw from your findings. Conclusions that a researcher may want to draw from your findings, but that you actually cannot draw. Or you can think off biases that arise from participants dropping out. It depends very much on your study, but most of the time, finding at least one limitation isn't that difficult now. The second goal is, if possible, toe. Also qualify your limitations, but it's important to Onley Qualify them after your first admitted them. This is very important because you do not want to give the impression that you're just tryingto argue your limitations away. So here's some examples. Although these alternative explanations off our results cannot be ruled out entirely there to patterns in the results that point towards our primary explanation. See what happens here. I admit explicitly that there is a valid limitation. But then I explained why it may not matter so much war. Although our findings allow for the alternative explanation that, uh, it results by Devin, it'll are in conflict with his explanation. Taking this into account, the more plausible explanation for our finding is, and so on war, all of the dropout rate was considerable. We observed no difference between participants who completed our study and participants who dropped out. So what I want you to notice here is that each of these sentences starts by admitting the limitation. So be sure that even if you have good arguments against your limitation, that you don't just argue the way wide away first, make very, very clear to your reader that you admit your limitation. Okay, so that's how you write limitations again. You can find more expressions in the discussion, outline and writing templates. And in the next lecture, we're going to talk about writing the summary and conclusion section at the very end off your discussion section. 29. Summary & Conclusions: okay. And the last part of your discussion section will be the summary and the conclusion. And there's actually a relatively straightforward part is you're going to see. So the goal of this part is to summarize when we have learned from your research and outlined the next step after your research. So common expressions you find here are in the present article we investigated. So you remind the reader off your research question. The results of two studies suggested that, taken together, this offers a novel perspective on future research may extend this work by and so on. So why is this section important? This section is important because, well, first of all, that's the last thing you Rita is going to reach. In addition, very often, what we does do is they jump right away to that section to get a summary off what they can learn from your research, and only if they like what they read in that section, they will actually go through the effort off reading your whole article. Therefore, it makes sense to start with your research question. Then, in most cases, I would go straight to the results and not mention the method anymore. And instead I would devote more space on reminding the reader off the implications. What have we learned? What is the value off this research? And one thing you definitely don't want to do is mentioning limitations. Okay? And in many cases, the best way to Aunt your summary and conclusion section is by talking about future research. I already mentioned this briefly. The best way to demonstrate the value off your research is by showing that not only does it have interesting implications, so this part but it can also inspire us to create more amazing research, especially since almost all of your readers will be researchers. They will definitely like that. So this is what you do in the summary conclusion section, and that's already the last section off the discussion section. And in the next lectures, we're going to focus on the little things that still need to be done. The abstract, the title and so on. So join me for that in the next section 30. Acknowledgements Section: Okay. The next section after the discussion section are the acknowledgements, which is really a very, very small section. And the only thing you need to include in that section is two things. First of all, you want to mention sources off funding. And if the funding comes from your supervisors, which is most of the time, then they will be able to tell you what information you need to put here. And second, you can use the Acknowledgement section to thank people who have contributed to your research without really being co authors. So this can be colleagues or even friends or family. Or it can be anonymous reviewers who pointed out something that really helped to improve your manuscript, and that's already it. So you just put a new heading acknowledgements under your text. Then you mentioned just in text the sources of funding. You think that people have contributed to your research and you don't. And in the next lecture, I will show you how you can easily create a reference list 31. How to Add a Perfectly Formatted List of References in Seconds: okay, in this lecture, I want to show you how you can quickly add references to your paper. And I already showed this to you before, but I'm gonna show you again, just in case you forgot it. So if you have written some text that includes references and if you included those references with the word plug in off Mandali that I showed you earlier, then all you need to do at the end out of the acknowledgements is starting new heading, for example. References goes also gonna center that and then I go to the word plug in and I press insert . And there we go. Here we have all the references perfectly for mentors and in the right order. Now, one thing I want to add is supposed you change your text later, which is likely because very often we need to tweak our attacks. Because, for example, because of reviewers who said that we need to change something and suppose that, for example, you delete this sentence, Then what you want to do is after you have done the adjustments as you wanted to lead your list of references and inserted again, just to be sure that you have the right list of references, and that's already it. Okay, so now you know how to create a perfectly formatted list of references in seconds. And in the next lecture, I'm gonna show you how to write an effective abstract. 32. How to Write an Effective Abstract (Hint: It Is More Than a Summary): one of the last things you need to do in your paper is to write an abstract, and their two main goals that you want to achieve when you write an abstract in the first goal is that you want to summarize your article. So you want to make it easy for readers to get the gist out of your article, which also makes it easier for other researchers to understand and sites Your article, and the second goal is that you want to attract readers. You want to attract them to read your article and later to psych your article. So, without a might, what would you want to include in your abstract and the things you want to include? First of all and, most importantly, your research question. Second, why your research question is interesting. Your answer to the question or once you contributed with your research, why your answer is valuable. And finally, the methods and results and the order in which have presented them here is not the order in which you necessarily want to mention these things in the abstract, but they are ordered by importance. The most important thing that you need to make absolutely clear is the research question. Then why Your question is interesting, then the answer that you contributed why? Your answer is valuable and the least important thing is methods and results. Okay, with that in mind, let's go through a little case study. And I'm gonna use my research paper again that you already know because that was actually a research paper where the abstract was a little bit tricky. And I want to show you how I solved the problems that I faced. So here's the whole abstract. I was allowed to use 150 words for my abstract, and I used them. And the first thing I want to show you is that this whole section here is the section in which I just sound my research question and there was a reason for that because my problem waas that my research question was a question off which people thought that it was already answered. So I knew that no researcher would be interested in my research if I don't make clear in the abstract that this is an unanswered question and therefore I devoted 1/3 of my abstract to that. So I started by saying it is widely assumed among psychologists that people spontaneously formed trustworthiness, impressions off newly encountered people from their facial appearance and immediately after that. I say, however, because I wouldn't call that assumption into question as quickly as possible. And then I say that the empirical support for the spontaneous spatial trustworthiness impressions remains insufficient. And then I even make it more specific because I also say that in particular, it remains an open question whether these impressions are encoded in memory. So these are a lot of words just devoted to selling the research question. And I did that because I knew that if it would just state the research question, nobody would be interested in my research. Okay, the next I explained the method and the results. And as you can see, that was a really small part off my abstract, even though many people said that our method was very innovative. But now, after understanding what's really important in a research paper, which is that the question is interesting and that the answer is convincing, you will understand why I chose to not focus on this strength off my research paper and now all the rest is just devoted to selling the answer to the question. This was shown under conditions off varying context, relevance and civilians off trustworthiness. Moreover, evidence for this tendency was obtained using both experimentally controlled artificial and naturalistic varying riel faces. So all I'm really saying here is that these are very robust results then taken together, these results suggest that there is a spontaneous tendency to form relatively stable trustworthiness impressions from facial appearance, which is relatively independent off the context. So again, a point towards the robustness off the results. And then as such, our results further underline how widespread influences off facial trustworthiness, maybe in our everyday life, so in the last sentence are also make a little bit clear with a value off our researchers. So, as you can see here, I spend most of my words to selling the research question and selling the answer. I did also mention methods and results, but really, really briefly. And so with this abstract, I felt I have checked the most important boxes off a strong abstract, and that doesn't mean that in your case it has to look the same way. In your case, it may be that your research question is, by itself already so interesting that just by stating it, you've already captivated your reader. And in that case, you may just mention your research question in one sentence. So it doesn't have to be that 1/3 of your abstract is just focused on selling the question . Instead, the point I want to make is one off priority. First, make sure that you sell your question Well, whether that is in one sentence or two sentences or three sentences, whatever works for you, then make sure that you sell your answer well. And then you can focus on describing your methods and results. Okay, so that's is for the abstract. And in the next lecture, I will show you how you can create a strong title for your research paper. 33. How to Create a Strong Title: Choosing a strong title for your research paper is very important because the title off your paper is the first thing that potential future readers are going to see before they decide whether to look further at your paper or not. So what has a strong title looked like? And here's some major properties of a strong title. First, a strong title has to include the research question or the answer. If every possible answer to your research question would be interesting, and it can make sense to state the research question in your title to keep the suspense. So, for example, for the question. What causes depression? Almost every possible answer would be interesting. But if in your case, not every possible answer is interesting. But actually the answer that you found is particularly interesting. It can make more sense to state the answer in the title. So an example for this would be a title. Such s insulin causes impotence. The question here would be does insulin costs impotence, but probably nobody would be interested in that. But if you tell them that the answer is yes, people may be very interested in your research. In any case, you want to include either the research question or the answer in the title. Second, a strong title is short, and it should use maximally 15 words, if less, even better. Third, a strong title should also use the relevant keywords words that a commonly used in your field and that other researchers are likely to use as search terms to find your paper. Fourth, a strong title should be attention grabbing. When researchers see your title among several research paper titles, they should be drawn towards your title. And fifth, a strong title should communicate was new. Okay, when you look at this, you may realize that this is a lot of stuff for something that is basically just one sentence. And there's the danger that if you cramp all of this at one title, the title gets very messy and enter being more confusing than effective. So, first of all, I want to show you a little trick that can help you to prevent that, which is the colon trick Now. I'm not saying that you necessarily should use the Colin trick, but I'm saying that it can be a useful trick to bring more order to your title, and the Colin trick basically means that you split your title into two parts separated by a color. So, for example, your title could be a general description colon and then a specific description. Or it could be an attention grabber colon and then a description of your research. Or it could be the topic colon and then again, a description off your research. So this can be a very useful trick to get MAWR into your title without confusing the reader . So let's have a look at some examples off Rheal titles of research papers. So the 1st 1 is agent based modelling, a new approach for theory building in social psychology. This is a paper from obviously social psychology, and, as you can see here, it starts by stating the general topic and then narrows it down and makes clear what's new in this paper. Another example is learning quickly when irrelevant attributes about a new linear threshold algorithm. This is a computer science paper, I believe, and it starts with a description off. What, the question off the research waas. How do you learn quickly when irrelevant attributes about and then they communicate clearly what the contribution off. Their research is it's a new linear threshold algorithm. Okay. Another example is the face a window to the soul investigation off the A currency off intuitive judgements off the trustworthiness of human faces. So there's a very long title, and in my opinion, it's a bit too long. But nevertheless, there some interesting things going on here, So they start with an attention grabber. Is the face a window to the soul? That's a very captivating way of introducing their research. And then they describe dryly what their research paper is actually about. And as I said already, in my opinion, this title is too long. But I like the first part of the title. I think the first part of the title is very well thought through. Okay, One more example. The strength of week learn ability. This is a very influential paper, and I think it has an amazing title, and the reason is because it is a very short title. It makes clear what the research is about, and it is captivating, and it is captivating mainly because of the conflict between strength and weak, the strength of week learn ability. This title puzzles me and makes me want to read the paper. It is short, it is clear it has a lot of things that a good title has, and that might be part of the reason why this was a very successful research paper. So as you can see, there are many ways to construct titles. But they generally have in common that they clearly state what the research is about. So they either state the question or the answer off the research. They include relevant keywords there, often attention grabbing. They communicate what's new and, if possible, they also short. So try to check off as many items as it can possibly can. And if you find that your title gets too confusing, used the Kahlon trick. 34. Editing 1: Five Tips to Take Your Writing to the Next Level: Once you've written the first version of your research paper, the next step is to add it and find unit. Now the first thing I would recommend you look at is the length, and you want to shorten your paper as much as possible. Very often, this is actually necessary because the journals we want to publish in half award limit. But even if you don't have a word limit most of the time when you short in your paper, it gets better. So I encourage you to think about the question. Are there sentences or even whole paragraphs that you could remove and the story off your tax would still work? And if that's the case, that most of the time that means that you should remove them. Another aspect that is worth thinking about is the structure and especially the paragraphs . And ideally, each paragraph should have one clear message. Each paragraph should make one point, and if you find that you can't really tell what the point off your paragraph is, most of the time that will be because you're putting too much into one paragraph. Then I would suggest that you think again about how you want to structure your tax into paragraphs. Very often it helps to just split a long paragraph up. But sometimes you also may need a little bit more restructuring. Another thing to think about is your wording. Is it consistent? So, for example, I could call the so called new view on depression the information processing view. I could call it the focus view. I could call it the cognitive you. But ideally, I should just pick one and stick to that in the whole paper because it makes the writing a lot more clear. Another thing to think about is is everything you're saying. True and basically what this means is that whenever you make a claim, you should have a citation for it. If you don't have a citation for it, you should mark it as speculation. So you should use an expression such as it is conceivable that or we speculate that something that mocks you claim as something that is not yet established. And finally, I also encourage you to think about the clarity off your writing. And for that you can definitely use the useful English expression sheet. And in the next lecture, I want to zoom into this a little bit more and show you how we can use these expressions to really find two new writing. So I see in the next lecture 35. Editing 2: How to Be Clear AND Concise (At The Same Time): the art of good writing is to be clear and concise at the same time, and probably one of the best tools to achieve that are signaling words. So in this election, want to show this to you and give you a couple of examples for that? So, first of all, let me show you how you can use signaling words to make your writing more clear. So let's say that you have written the following. For example, Fried speculated that depression is caused by unprocessed traumas. Devin's findings indicated that depression may be caused by a learned focus on the negative . In this example, a Rita could wonder what you're actually trying to say. But if we add one little expression, which is in contrast, it gets immediately clear that you're trying to describe a conflict. So now, it says, Fried speculated that depression is caused by unprocessed traumas. In contrast, Devin's findings indicated that depression may be caused by a learned focus on the negative . It's immediately clear that you're describing a conflict here. Okay, here's another example. The Depression level was measured prior to the treatment. Participants were randomly assigned to a treatment and a placebo group now compare this to the following first, the pre treatment depression level was measured. Next, participants were randomly assigned to a treatment and a placebo group. So what's happening here is that the expressions first and second, makes immediately clear. That is a sequence of events, and in addition, the expression pre treatment makes immediately clear that there's a treatment coming next. And so what you can see here is that little words can really make a huge difference for the clarity of your writing, and you can use the useful English expressions. Pdf to find expressions they can use Now. I want to zoom in a little bit further, even because ideally, what you want to achieve is that readers are able to understand your text without ever going back. So at no point in time, you really should think, Oh, now I get it. But they should always get it right away. So let me give you an example for that. So let's say you're finding an article. This theory is supported by finding X. In addition, finding why also provides support for this theory. Moreover, the theory is supported by finding Zet. Now here is in principle clear what the author is trying to say. The author just lists three types of findings that support a particular theory, but the problem is that this isn't clear at every moment. So when you transition from sentence one descendants, too, this theory supportive of finding X and then you start sentenced to, in addition, finding why now the sentence is about fighting. Why? And you don't know yet that this finding is also going to support the theory so you don't even know the descendants is still about the theory. So therefore, a much clearer way to right. This would be three findings support this theory. First, the theory is supported by finding X. Another source of support is finding why. Finally, the theory is supported but finding sets. So here the writing first gives you an outline of what's going to come, then signaling words. Make sure that you know that you were at the beginning of the list or the middle of the list or the end of the list. So at every point in time, the reader understands what's going on. Okay, when you're trying to do that, you might encounter another problem, which is that you also need to keep it concise. There's the danger that if we try to get to clear, the reader actually gets impatient. Get to the point. That's also something we want to prevent. So let me give you an example for that. So let's say we find in an article there are two conflicting views on depression that are worth considering. The first view was introduced by fright. He speculated that depression is caused by unprocessed traumas. However, there's a second beyond depression. The second view is that depression is caused by how information are processed. Specifically, Devon's findings indicated that depression may be caused by a learned focus on the negative . So in this example, at pretty much every point in time, it is clear what the text says. But it's just way too long for research articles. So let me show you a better version. They're two views on depression. Freud's view is the depression is caused by un process traumas. In contrast, Devin's findings indicated that depression may be caused by a learned focus on the negative . So again we get an idea off what's going to come, and then we get clearly signaled where we are in the list, and that's really all we need with the right signaling you can be very clear and also be very concise. And if you find that sweet spot where readers feel that you really telling them a lot without using a lot of words, they were really love your writing. All right, that's how we editor paper and I see you in the next lecture. 36. Summary: The Whole Course in Less Than 3 Minutes: all right, You're almost at the end of this course. And in this lecture, I want to give you a summary off all the key lessons from this course because in most lectures we have been very, very zoomed in, and I also want you to see the bigger picture off what you've learned. So we started this course with two goals, and the first goal was to learn how to write a research paper, and the second goal was to learn how to make it successful. So how to sell your research? Well, in your writing and at the beginning, we talked a little bit about writing strategy and how it makes sense to a start with an outline that serves as the blueprint off your final paper and during this course of guided youth of the steps off, creating that outline and then turning it into text. In addition, we also talked a lot actually about the content and structure of an effective research paper. And we started with the inside that an effective research paper has two key components, which are an interesting question and a compelling answer. And the first step is usually to phrase your research question in a way that the question is interesting, but you're also able to give a compelling answer. And then we zoomed into this a little bit more and split up the task off. Making the question interesting into three sub course. One is to show that the topic is important. The other is to show that the question is novel so that it hasn't been answered before. And the final goal is to show that your question is timely in the sense that it's the logical next step after the research that has already been conducted. And we did the same for the compelling answer. We split it up into showing that the answer is convincing and also that the answer is valuable. Okay, so that's what we need to achieve. But how do we do that in the paper? And we discuss that showing that your question is interesting is what happens mostly in the introduction. Specifically in the first paragraph, you show that your topic is important, and then, in your literature review, you show that your question is novel and that it is timely. Conversely, showing that your answer is compelling happens in the discussion section more precisely. You sure that your answer is convincing when you interpret the results? And when you discuss limitations off your research and you show that you're answer is valuable in the integration of your research into existing research, where you mainly show that your research is something novel and that contributes something new and in the implications where you discuss the broader value off your findings, what do we understand? Better, what applications may be possible? And then finally, the last step is to edit and find to and what you have done and this how all the great writers that I know achieved great papers. They write something that maybe isn't that great, and then they make it a little bit better and a little bit better on a little bit better. And that is in a nutshell. How you achieve a great research paper. All right, that's it for this lecture. And I see you in the next one 37. Conclusion: Hey, congratulations on finishing this course. I hope you get a lot of value out of it. I certainly try to put a lot of useful material into it. And if they're still things that are unclear or other things that you want to ask them, don't forget that there's also the Q and A section in which you can ask questions any time , and I will do my best to answer them as quickly as possible. Also, please don't forget to leave a rating for this course. And if you don't think that this course is worthy or five stars, I would be really interested to learn what I can do better. All right, that's it. Thank you for the time and effort you put in this course. See you again and good luck with your paper. 38. BONUS: How to Deal With Null-Results?: welcome to this bonus lecture. I was recently asked, What do you do if you have no results? And I thought it's a very good question. And so I decided to add this bonus lecture in which I will do my very best to give you some pointers to deal with this problem. So by no results, we mean that, for example, if we're comparing a treatment in the placebo group that there is no difference between the two groups, and if you're using inferential statistics, then it means that your P value is larger than point or five. And this tends to be a relatively tricky situation because it's quite difficult to sell no results in your writing. So in this lecture I will give you some pointers how you can get the most out of your no results. So, first of all, why and no results problematic in the first place and their two main problems with no results, and the first problem is that conclusions from no results are often not very convincing. Remember that the two qualities, often effective answer to your research question, is that the question is convincing and valuable on a null result in most cases will make your results less convincing. So why is that? While one reason is that your results can simply reflect method illogical issues. So in the Depression study, it could be that the treatment wasn't executed correctly. Or it could be that the measure off depression was unreliable on both of these issues can lead to no results, even if the treatment is effective. And that's the whole problem here. It's very hard to conclude from a null result that there isn't anything going on, for example, that the treatment doesn't work. Another reason for the same problem is that you're results may reflect statistical issues. Most of the time, that will mean that your sample size is too low. Maybe if you just had more participants, we would actually see that the treatment worked. And so for all of these reasons, it's hard to draw a convincing conclusion from no results. So that is the first problem, and the second problem is that conclusions from no results often also do not seem valuable . So, for example, even if you can make the case that there no methodological issues in your study and no statistical issues, so that he can really say with quite high certainty that the treatment didn't work. Then the problem is who really cares about an ineffective treatment. And so to deal with Noel results, we need to fix all of these problems that you can see here. We need to make the conclusion convincing by ruling out methodological and statistical issues, and we need to make the case that our results are still valuable. Okay, so the first step will be to deal with methodological issues, and one of the best solutions is to use a manipulation check if you have a manipulation check in your study. So, for example, if you show that although the refocus treatment does not reduce depression, it does cause people to focus less on the negative. Then that may rule out the concern that you just didn't execute the treatment correctly because it obviously did what it was supposed to do. It reduced the focus on the negative. It just doesn't reduce depression. Okay, if you don't have a manipulation check than another solution you can use is to look at other people's research. So the goal here would be to show that your method has been established by previous research so that they cannot be much doubt about your method. So, for example, if you follow it the same treatment protocol as another study, and if he used the same measurement off depression as another study, and both seem to be finding the other study, then there isn't really much reason to believe that their method a logical issues in your study. And so, by comparing yourself to a similar research, you can make the case that there were no method a logical issues in your study. Okay, so that's Step one now. The next step is to rule out statistical issues and again there several things you can do. One thing you can do is to use a power analysis. A power analysis can show that your sample size would be sufficient to detect a very small effect. In other words, with the power analysis, you can make the case that even if there is a treatment effect, it will be very, very small. Another solution is again to use other people's research, so what you can do is you can show that similar research found significant results with the same or even a lower sample size than yours. And I've seen successful examples off both of these solutions. Okay, so that's step two. Now, the last step will be to get the reader interested in your no results. And usually the way you do that is by embedding your research into a theoretical context in which the no result is interesting. Okay, that sounds very abstract. So let me give you an example. So in the fictional Depression study, the fact that the treatment is ineffective may not be very interesting. However, this study was not just about the question whether the treatment is effective, but it was also about testing different explanations off depression. Is depression caused by an unprocessed trauma, or is it caused by a certain information processing style where people overly focused on the negative? So in this case, you could make the no result more interesting by focusing more on the implication that the cognitive explanation off depression the one about the negative focus is false. And the reason why this is more interesting is because this is not just about a specific type of treatment, but it's about a whole class of treatments. So this is a much bigger implication and therefore a lot more interesting. Okay, Once you made it through all of these steps, then the next thing you will have to do is to write this down. And here is really important to use very cautious language. Remember what I discussed with you about writing about limitations. You always want to admit the limitation first so that you don't give the impression that you're just trying to argue your way out of it. So you want to write something like given that the results were not significant, conclusions must be drawn with caution. Nevertheless, the data may allow for a few general conclusions when taking all results into consideration . And then you could write down your solutions to all the three steps that we just discussed . And with such a careful and skeptical introduction, you really will be much more likely to go along with your thinking rather than thinking that you're just trying to argue your way out of it. Okay, so that's how you can deal with no results. I hope it's helpful. And if you haven't given a rating for this course yet, you could do me and future students a huge favor by just quickly leaving a rating for this course. All right. Thank you for listening. And let me know if you have more questions.