Report on lecture on “How to Write a Research Paper?”

- Aujas Sohal

Sophia Club, the philosophy club of Manipal University Jaipur had organized a lecture to enlighten the students in campus on “How to Write a Research Paper”. The lecture was presented by Prof. Dr. Anthony S. Raj sir and Dr. Pradeep Chahar sir. Dr. Anthony sir, Professor of Philosophy and HOD of Dept. of Arts, welcomed our lecturer Dr. Pradeep sir.

 

As the lecture began, it was focused more on how to conduct the research. The research material should be systematic, replicable and logical. The main part of research is its hypothesis, which works as a guide and a result which the researcher aims towards. It is suggested that you always keep a hypothesis so you don’t divert from the aim of the research. Another important factor is the administrative feasibility, whether you have enough money to afford all the equipment and data required. Once your cost factor is in check, next are your sources from where you organize your samples. Different kinds of scientific methods exist for this purpose. These samples that are collected, are accepted to be same for the entire group, this is called generalization. Since there are too many variables that cannot be controlled by the researcher, he or she aims to use the sample collected from a smaller group and accepts it as the same for the entire group. The lecturer then gave us the example, ‘Impact of stress on sexes’, stated two kinds of hypothesis, a non-directional hypothesis, which doesn’t bring much clarity to the topic and a directional hypothesis, which brings clarity and acts as the aim of the research. The major characteristic of a hypothesis is that it should be testable or else the entire research may become pointless.

The lecturer then continued forward with the quote, “Writing a research report carefully and accurately is an art.” The next major part of research is assessment and measurement. In situations where you do not mathematically use any definition or formula, the conclusion you make is called an assessment. Whereas, the conclusion calculated accurately by a mathematical formula and definition is called measurement. Each time you write a research paper choosing the topics is also a very important issue, as the topic and sub topics should be made so that the paper follows a continuous flow and is easy to follow. Making objective decisions is a critical point in research, as the researcher has to make unbiased decisions and there should never be any scientific dishonesty of ethics. Falsification of data is a very common example of scientific dishonesty, plagiarism being on the rise, each research report on similar topics is bound to have some lines in common, and hence the scientific community has set a level of acceptance of similar material. Other such breach of ethics includes falsification of data, faulty data gathering process. Justification and validity of data is another concern, a researcher should be able to justify why he has chosen the topics, the samples and the formulae. Errors in research are bound to happen, no matter how careful the researcher is, there are two types of errors, type 1 and type 2. Type 1, rejecting the null hypothesis, when it is true and type 2, rejecting the null hypothesis when it is false. Null hypothesis indicates similarity in the group. The more dangerous error of the two varies from situation to situation. The lecturer concluded his topic with a quote, “Research is to see that everyone sees, but to think what no one has thought.”

After the topic was concluded, Dr. Anthony sir offered us some insight on how to actually write down the research on paper. Remembering every quote we come by, so that when we use it ourselves, we never forget to give due credit.

Sophia Club member Hrishabh offered the vote of thanks and brought the event to a close. Pen and paper in each hand, every student looked forward to writing a research paper themselves one day.   
(Photographs by Abhishek Sharma)