Research publications mostly use a similar structure of the content. This allows readers of these documents to have a familiar orientation in the document. It also provides the writer with the state of mind, to structure their thoughts that readers can follow more easily.
- Abstract
- Introduction
- Materials and Methods
- Results
- Discussion
- Conclusion
- Future Work
Depending on the type of work (ex. bachelor thesis or phd) there are some sections at the beginning of the document, that are left out in research publications:
The title page of a thesis includes the name of the thesis, the institute at which it is submitted. The authors of the document and also the chair (if any) of the institute. Furthermore the examiners are listed with their full name, title and position at the institute.
Supervisors are not listed at the title page. Often one of the examiner are also the supervisor and could be get a sentence as a thanks in the thanks section. If not, they should get a special paragraph as a honorable mention.
In research publications, there is often no title page. Instead the title of the document together with a list of authors and the abstract (in this order) are put in front of the Introduction.
with a statement that declares the following document as own work and if a part/section/information or other things in this document used, are not own work, it is marked and the original author(s) are named.
This statement has some significant impact, if parts of the document are not own work and there is no correct crediting for this work.
Often in thesis documents this section also includes some short paragraphs to thank people that helped in the work or document, but are not an author of this document.
The Abstract is a short preamble at the beginning of a document (mostly before an index) describing the content of the document. It should not be more then half a page and at least two paragraphs.
This section of the document introduces all necessary information to understand the upcoming research/work. It includes all state-of-the-art, tools used and other needed information for the reader. It gives also the motivation for this work. And desrcibes and presents the structure of the presentation of the work in the next section.
This is a section describing the environmental situation and questions that lead this research. It also gives the intention of this research and the questions that should be answered by this research work.
➥ Means: Here the hypothesis and its root cause is presented.
This section lists and explains already existing science and solutions to the questions. It also reasons and shows why these solutions are not sufficient.
Subsequent sections to state-of-the-art cover the tools and information used, that a reader needs to understand, to follow/understand the work of the document.
These informations/tools are described in an objective mannor. A focus of the introduction on how this is concret used in this work should be avoided.
Also if modifactions or extensions are needed, that this information/tool is usable for the work in this document, this circumstance should only be mentioned and explained in more detail in the next section.
At the beginning a short overview of the subsections and its purposes are given.
After this, the section presents the research in sufficient detail that, other scientists can reproduce and replicate the research.
Here are all developed tools, created or invented methods and used informations described. This section is also shows the modifications or extensions made to the tools, informations or methods.
Description of the found results and how data from the experiments is analysed is presented in this section. Some Journals ask the writer of a publication to place this and the following section before the Materials and Methods section.
This section reasons about the meaning of the results and their application in the field of science of this research.
This section presents the outcome of the work, by relating it to the motivation in introduction and reason about the consequences/impact to the science field and/or research subject.
The future work section is often optional and a personal, less formal section. In this ideas to improve the research if done a second time is presented. And also new questions the outcome of this research introcduces are listed.
This section lists all used previous work mentioned in this document.
The Additional Informations section is a place at the end of a science document that includes all informations like
- Lists
- Images
- Program-Code Snippets
- ...
that help in understanding the work, but to long to include in the main sections of the document. Or they are put in this section to prevent the document to be too cluttered and hard to read.