A typical research paper will have the following four sections: Introduction, Method, Results and Discussion. There will of course also be a title, an abstract and keywords in the beginning, and acknowledgements, references and other material at the end, but here we will focus on the middle four.
Introduction
The Introduction section contains the motivation to why the paper exists. It answers questions such as:
- What is the problem?
- Aren’t there available solutions already? If so, why are they not good enough?
- What’s unique about the presented solution?
- Is there a hypothesis we want to prove (or disprove)?
The section describes the current situation for the readers, as if they had done a similar study themselves. It should therefore be written in present tense. In order to make sure all necessary questions are answered, you can follow the CARS structure.
Often you can see related work up here, but in my personal opinion such information is better left for the Discussion section at the end. You of course need to mention a few selected previous solutions at this early point, but in order to be able to compare these to the solution presented in the current paper, you first need to describe the current solution. Hence, related work at the end. At that point the reader is also most likely to have read your solution, and has an easier time understanding the relationship and differences between the solutions.
As a sub section, it can be useful with a Background sub section, providing information that may help the reader in understanding the method used.
Method
The Method section contains the description of what has been done in order to produce the material later presented in the Results section. It should be written in past tense.
Ideally, this section should be sufficiently detailed enough for another researcher to repeat the study and verify the results. What that means in practice is highly specific for the research area and what type of study was made. The steps when making an experiment with human subjects are quite different from when doing a systematic literature review.
Results
The Results section contains the objective results after applying the Method described previously. It should also be written in past tense. Generally, this section is best when written as objective as possible, so leave all interpretations for later.
Discussion
At the end, we return to the present tense. Given the results above, we can provide our interpretations in the Discussion section. Here we can also explain how the results changes the world compared to how it was described in the Introduction.
Even more compressed, we can summarise the four sections like this:
- Introduction: the previous situation.
- Method: what we did.
- Result: what we found.
- Discussion: the new situation.
Interestingly enough, these sections also provide a good order for email contents, presentations, speeches, etc.