Structuring your research article

• Abstract: You will most likely write this last. It needs to be a summary of the whole article, just the high points so readers can know ahead of time what to expect.
• Introduction: Begin by stating why the topic is of interest to the field and how it may advance our understanding of a particular aspect. Describe aim and purpose of the work. This section should prepare the reader for the following sections, both the lit-review and the actual research.
• Literature Review: This section will be done as a stand alone assignment and once you have incorporated the feedback and improvements recommended by your instructor it can be inserted here with appropriate transition sentences at the beginning and end. Don’t forget these!!
• Materials and Methods: Although you are using an online tool to run your experiment, you need to fully describe and explain each step in the process of conducting this research project. Your unique factors that were used and how the parameters were established and monitored.
• Results: This is the actual product your generated by conducting the research. This should be presented in two formats, written and graphic. Since you have multiple factors that you manipulated in running the experiment, result for each trial need to be reported separately. Graphs and tables need to have titles, numbers and labels for scales, axis and lines or symbols used. (see – Cargill, M. (2013). Research articles and structures. In P. O’Connor (Ed.), Writing Scientific Research Articles: Strategy and Steps (11-16).

Discussion of the results: You should be able to draw some information from the results you reported. What does it mean when you change a particular variable and then the