Skip to Main Content

How to Write a Research Paper

A general process for writing a research paper at the college level.

Step 4

gender equality symbol that combines male and female symbols with an equal sign in the center
[Gender equality symbol. unknown origin].

Narrow Your Topic

Ok. So, you’ve done some brainstorming, and you’ve looked at some of the stuff in the databases. Now focus. Get the topic into a form that is specific enough to research without having mass amounts of articles, but still general enough to have some articles.

Back to our example of women’s rights. What part of women’s suffrage are you looking into? There are a lot of them.

  • The right to vote?
  • Equal pay?
  • Work benefits?
  • Time off?
  • Equal treatment in and out of the workplace?
  • Hiring equality?

There are a lot of areas to look into. Find your niche, preferably one that you like and can be researched.

Creative Commons License This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.