How To Write A Research Report: A Comprehensive Guide

WHAT IS A RESEARCH REPORT?

A research report is a document which presents the findings of experimental or another type of research. Unlike an essay or research paper, the primary goal of a research report is to present the findings of research that you have conducted on your own. As such, when preparing to write a research report, it is important that you have organized your findings and that you are capable of understanding how to present them in the most accurate and comprehensible manner to the person reading or grading your paper.

Unlike a research paper or essay, a research report tends to not be driven by a thesis. Instead, it will introduce the methods of data analysis, present results, and briefly discuss interpretation. These are the three main sections of a research report although some custom research reports will not contain an interpretation section. Typically, whether or not a research report contains an interpretation section is based on the level of the course you are taking. While higher level classes will often require you to interpret the data you have collected, especially at the graduate level, lower level classes will generally not have such a requirement and will instead simply focus on having you present the findings of your research when you write a research report.

Research reports can be assigned in every discipline but tend to be very common in the sciences – for example biology, chemistry and physics. This is because professors and teachers in these subjects will often have their students conduct research that is aimed to teach them basic concepts. When writing such research reports, students are expected to generate findings similar to those which benchmarking for such experiments have produced in the past. Often, when conducting an experiment for a research report, you will be mimicking an experiment that was originally conducted by a great scientist like Einstein because the ease of conducting such research today is far greater than it was when it was originally done. If you are made aware that you are replicating a famous experiment, it is often possible to examine the original experiment or a web source to determine whether or not your results are in the appropriate range associated with the original research project.

While the form and nature of a research report might change depending on the class you are taking, the basis process of writing a research report does not. Fundamentally, you are presenting the results of your research to prove that you undertook the research, that you knew what you were doing, and so that you can tie the data collected to course materials. In this respect, connecting methodology to findings and interpretation when necessary, represents the so-called cocktail associated with writing a research report. If you follow this recipe when you write a research report, you will likely be very successful and will obtain the highest possible grade.

HOW TO WRITE A RESEARCH REPORT

The first step in writing any research report is to gather you results and methodology. You will begin by writing out your methodology by listing the steps that you took in terms of completing your research so as to write your research reports. Typically, your teacher will have provided you with some guidance on how to conduct the experiment. When you present your methodology in your research report, you must absolutely not copy and paste the instructions originally provided by your professor. Instead, you should reword the both to avoid plagiarism and to display to your professor that you actually conducted the research and understood its different steps.

The second step of writing a research report is to present your findings. Depending on your assignment, you may be asked to do this in text or graph form. Always follow the instructions that you receive when writing a research report to avoid losing unnecessary points. There are two critical imperatives when presenting findings in a written research report. The first is that you ensure that the findings you are presenting in the appropriate range if you are working on an experiment that has previously been benchmarked. The second is that you must present your results in an accurate manner that will immediately be clear to the reader. Regardless of whether you are simply listening your results or making graphs to show them, make sure that you are presenting your results in a clear and understandable manner that will not cause your professor to believe that there is any ambiguity or lack of clarity in your custom research report.

Finally, sometimes you will write a research report that will ask you to analyze your findings. While this is most common in advanced undergraduate and graduate level classes, this is something that be asked at any level. When writing a research report that involves interpreting your findings, it is important that you understand the nature of the experiment and the effect of the independent variable or variables that you are analyzing in relation to the dependent variable or variables. Having a firm understanding of the purpose of the experiment and what is being measured as the objective of the research report is critical for presenting it in a way that is effective and compelling for your instructor. If you fail to interpret your results in an appropriate fashion when asked to do so, your professor may not believe that you completed the research and may give you a failing grade. Writing a custom research report thus requires that you are not only capable of providing your methodology and findings but also demonstrating an understanding of the experiment through this portion of the custom research report.

HOW TO FORMAT A RESEARCH REPORT

When writing a research report, the most commonly accepted fonts are Times New Roman, Cambria, and Arial. The first step that you should take is making sure that you are using a size 12 font and double-spacing your text. Double-spacing is important because it ensures that your margins are even and that all of your text can fit onto the page without then running onto the next page. You should normally align the text left, and unless your professor has told you otherwise, do not click the Justify button. You should then set your margins to 1 inch on all sides of the document as this is the standard academic convention for research reports.

Once you have formatted your research report in this way, you may want to use headings so as to organize your research report in terms of methodology, results, and interpretation. Headings should be bolded and centered over the paragraphs that they refer to. Aligning headings centrally and putting them in bold will make them more visible and make it easier for your reader to follow the structure of your research reports.

WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A RESEARCH REPORT AND A RESEARCH PAPER?

Research papers and research reports differ significantly. While all research papers are research reports, not all research reports are research papers. If you have been asked to write a research report, you must never forget that the core of your report is the presentation of the findings of your research than the thesis associated with a research paper. The way that an essay is centered around a thesis and serves to build an argument to support the thesis is what makes a research paper. Conversely, a research report will not necessarily have a thesis and will sometimes simply involve the presentation and interpretation of the data collected during experimentation or other types of research.