Headings and Organization

Headings and Organization

A major part of a paper's readability includes the overall organization. The organization is greatly facilitated by including headings in your paper. Headings help to organize your thoughts and communicate that organization to the reader. What follows is a basic outline of the different headers that should be used in a research paper.

Introduction/Background

• Provide a literature review
• Discuss why this is important
• Present the objectives of the study

Methods

• Data – describe your data: where you obtained it (include URL); what you did to your data (cleaned, removed outliers, etc.); issues with the data.
• Analysis – describe the methods you used to perform your analysis in a systematic manner.

Results

• Present your findings and analysis.
• Consider the presentation of the results. Some might be better illustrated in a table, graph, map, or a combination of these.

Discussion/Conclusion

• Provide an interpretation of your results and findings
• Discuss the limitations
• Discuss potential future work

References

• List references alphabetically by author